Middle Passage (6 page)

His second duty was to stay drunk. Every man “knew the ropes”—specifically, the sheets and halyards that controlled the sails; each knew the ship's parts and principles, and any one of them, from the boatswain's mate to the cabin boy Tom, could undertake the various duties involved—to hand, reef, or steer—but only a fool would stay sober when he wasn't on watch. The whole Middle Passage, you might say, was one long hangover. It had the character of a four-month binge. And the biggest sot of all, I discovered, the most pitiful rumpot, was Josiah Squibb. Stepping timidly into the grimy cookroom after Cringle left me, my arms over my head in case Squibb pegged something at me for stealing his papers, I found the adjacent spirit room open and Squibb as polluted as I'd left him in the tavern. The poor devil's head lay on a long table littered with strips of salt pork and bricklike biscuits double-baked back on shore. His parrot was drunk too, but his voice was not as faint as Squibb's, who was in that advanced stage of alcoholic stupor that severs mind from body, both his eyeballs large as eggs, and glaring blankly into a mug of warm beer, as drunks often
do, talking to his reflection. “Josiah,” he sniffed. Then answered: “Yes?” “If yuh wants respect, darlin', yuh got to leave the ruddy cup alone, yes yuh do. Yuh wants 'em to respect yuh now, don't yuh?” “Yes,” he said, “yes, I do. . . .”

“'H'lo?” I stepped closer. “Mr. Squibb, are you all right, sir?”

“Do I
look
all right?” He sat scratching under one arm, squinting to see me more clearly. “I'm a wee bit drunk with dinner to fix, and so help me I can't
do
it!” The movement of looking up tipped him backward (the ship veering larboard didn't help either), and I was obliged to catch him under his armpits, then pitch him forward. He let his head hang. “Fix me some blackstrap, will ye, then finish up this mess.”

“But I've never—”

“Do
it.” Squibb filled his cheeks with wind, then he swallowed. “I'll show ye how.”

Following his orders, I helped him prepare mess, and mess it was, for the biscuits were hard and full of weevils (“I left two teeth in one of 'em this morning,” said Squibb), the salt beef tasted of the barrel in which it had been packed, not being helped very much by the onions and peppers I added, and would have been intolerable if not for the beer—each crewman, he said, consumed a gallon a day, but in Squibb's case it was more like three. He was, had been, an alcoholic since his first voyage at the age of eleven, though he wasn't exactly certain of his age, and precious little else when he was pickled, which was every waking hour, as it turned out. His lips kept the set smile of a lush. There was no risk in his recognizing me from the tavern; he had trouble keeping track of my identity from one hour to the next. And, sad to say, this was probably Squibb's last voyage. Only a slaver would have him. His right foot was dead. He'd drunkenly
stepped off a mizzentop during his last trip, having forgotten where he was, fallen twenty feet, and miraculously landed on his right foot. Which shattered. Where bone had been, Squibb now had a metal rod. He limped, of course. Like most fat people he wore his shirt outside his trousers whenever possible. He was slow, useless except in the cookroom, with lumps and udders in his face from liquor; a liability at sea, but what sailor could not see in Josiah Squibb his own portrait in years to come if Providence turned her back? As for his parrot, he was more or less the cook's shadow, having his bawdy humor, and even asked me occasionally, “You had any lately, mate?”

“Aye,” said Squibb, sipping blackstrap as I slopped salmagundi into buckets to haul to the great cabin. “I've
seen
some things, laddie. Reason I look so bad is 'cause I've been livin'.”

That made me pause in the doorway. Like Captain Falcon, like me and so many other people (except Isadora), he seemed to hunger for “experience” as the bourgeois Creoles desired possessions. Believing ourselves better than that, too refined to crave gross, physical things, we heaped and hived “experiences” instead, as Madame Toulouse filled her rooms with imported furniture, as if
life
was a commodity, a
thing
we could cram into ourselves. I was tempted to ask about his “experiences,” to have him share and display them before me like show-and-tell at school. Instead, I asked:

“Was it worth it?”

He flinched. “How do you mean?”

“Are you a better man for all that fast living?”

Squibb stared at me, growing sober now. “Yer a strange one, Illinois. Naw, darlin', I can't say better.” He laughed suddenly, but with little humor. “Ask my wives—all five of 'em—and they'd probably say I'm worse for it.”

“Five, is it now?”

“Or six.” Squibb shrugged. “I lose count. I gets drunk, ye know, and I forgets I'm married, and a woman comes along, and before I knows it I've proposed again, and do ye know what's odd? I keeps fallin' in love with the same kinda woman ovah and ovah again. They all look like my wife Maud—God rest her—when we first met. She was a pretty li'l thing. She ruined me, ye know. Spoiled me. I mean, Maud didn't even mind when I broke wind under the bedsheets: you
know
that's love, darlin'. She had long, dark hair, a waist no bigger than that”—he snapped his fingers—“and eyes dark as wine—they all do. They could be her sisters, for all the diff'rence, and damned if I don't slip sometimes 'n' call 'em by the pet name I give her—Stinky.” He sighed, perplexed, and rapped his temples with the heel of his palm, as if to shake his brain back in place. “Ain't the quantity of experiences that count I sometimes think, Illinois, but the quality. It's sorta like I keep lookin' for Stinky when she was seventeen so I kin do right by her this time.”

I left him still mumbling into his cup, and Squibb, I'm sure, didn't notice my absence for an hour. But what he'd said stuck to me like a barnacle. It seemed so Sisyphean, this endless seeking of a single woman's love—the vision of the first girl who snared his heart—in all others, because they would change, grow old, and he'd again be on a quixotic, Parmenidean quest for beauty beyond the reach of Becoming. Yet he seemed ironically faithful too, despite his several wives, his devotion to Stinky as deep as any monk's for the Virgin. A peculiar man, this Josiah Squibb, I thought, though really no stranger than the others in Captain Falcon's ragtag crew. We were forty of a company. And we'd all blundered, failed at bourgeois life in one way or another—we were, to
tell the truth, all refugees from responsibility and, like social misfits ever pushing westward to escape citified life, took to the sea as the last frontier that welcomed miscreants, dreamers, and fools. Only one sailor the mate warned me to stay away from, a dark, clean-shaven fellow, with thin brown hair and the air of a parson about him. Cringle pointed him out to me as he tied deadeyes down the deck from where we stood. “That'll be Nathaniel Meadows,” whispered Cringle, “and I'd not cross him, if I were you.”

I turned to give him a better look; Cringle swung me around.

“Don't
stare
at him, fool!”

“He doesn't look dangerous,” I said.

“Then,” said he, “your judgment of character is worse than your cooking. Meadows signed on to escape the authorities in Liverpool. He murdered his whole family while they slept, according to the skipper. Axed them all. The family dog, two cows, and a goat too.”

I tried to swallow. Failed. “Why?”

“D'ye care to stroll up 'n' ask him?”

“Oh, no . . . wouldn't think of prying. Hardly my business, you know, that sort of thing . . .”

The mate smiled. “Smart boy.”

Slowly, I gained my sea legs. By and by, I learned to keep down my dinner and keep up my end in the cookroom and on deck with this crew of American degenerates and dregs; but there's little point in describing individually the other men on board, for the voyage to Africa was uneventful, the men on ship capable at their specialties, and not one of them would live to see New Orleans again.

Only Cringle, I suppose, sensed what was coming. He had a sixth sense about disaster. Ankle-deep in deckwash,
he'd stand by the bowsprit some nights in the light of a single lantern, wearing a woolen fearnought to blunt the teeth of the wind, and stare. Just stare. The fact is that Cringle, more than all the others, was out of place: an officer by accident, I would learn, whose precise speech the crew saw as pomposity, whose sensitivity Captain Falcon read as weakness. The
Republic
was, above all else, a ship of
men.
Without the civilizing presence of women, everyone felt the pressure, the masculine imperative to prove himself equal to a vague standard of manliness in order to be judged “regular.” To fail at this in the eyes of the other men could, I needn't tell you, make your life at sea quite miserable. It led to posturing among the crew, a tendency to turn themselves into caricatures of the concept of maleness: to strut, keep their chests stuck out and stomachs sucked in, and talk monosyllabically in surly mumbles or grunts because being good at language was womanly. Lord knows, this front was hard to maintain for very long. You had to
work
at being manly; it took more effort, in a way, than rigging sails. The crewmen had drinking contests nearly every day. They gambled on who could piss the farthest over the rail, or on whose uncircumcised schlong was the longest, and far into the night lie awake in their hammocks swapping jokes about nuns sitting on candles. (And some of these, I must confess, weren't all that bad, even memorable, such as one Squibb told one night.

Q: What's the difference between a dog and a fox?

A: About four drinks.)

But Cringle kept his distance; the competition to prove the purity of one's gender, I'm guessing, made him uncomfortable, even melancholy, and this cost him the respect of the others, who claimed the mate, at age twenty-nine, was
a virgin. Little wonder then that he was relaxed only when alone, there on watch, or reading, or talking with me once he learned that I'd grown up in the household of a (Thomist) theologian.

“They can't feel it,” he said the night before we sighted land, looking back from the rail to where two men were carousing around a lantern. His gaze drifted from me back toward row after row of white-maned, foamy waves. That night the sea was full of explosions, rumblings deep as the earth tremors I'd learned to fear in southern Illinois, like the Devil knocking on the ground's thin crust. “Three quarters of the world's surface,” said Cringle, “is covered by that formless Naught, and I dislike it, Calhoun, being hemmed in by Nothing, this bottomless chaos breeding all manner of monstrosities and creatures that defy civilized law. These waters are littered with wrecked vessels. And I've seen monsters, oh, yes, such things are real down there.” He laughed bleakly. “Down there, reality fits more the dreams of slugs and snakes than men. 'Tis frightening to me sometimes,” he added, looking from me to his feet, “that all our reasoning and works are so provisional, so damned fragile, and someday we pass away like the stain of breath on a mirror and sink back into
that
from whence we've come.” He fumbled through his pockets for his pipe, then puffed hard to get it going. “They skim along the surface, the others; they have no feeling for what the sea
is”
. He gave a slow, Byronic sigh. “Sometimes I envy them for their stupidity.”

When he talked like this he frightened me. I wondered if the others were right about his being weak, or enfeebled somehow, and I hardly knew how to reply. “We'll be on land soon enough. I heard Squibb say we'd put to at the factory within the week.”

The mate smiled gently as if I'd said something stupid. “We're taking on Allmuseri tribesmen, Calhoun. Not Ashanti. Nor even Kru or Hausa—them, at least, I can understand. Have you ever seen an Allmuseri?”

I had to admit that I had not.

“Don't feel bad.” His smile vanished. “Few men have. Arab traders will bring them from the interior, I'm told, because no European has been to their village and lived to tell of it. They are an old people. Older, some say, than the !Kung Tribe of Southern Africa, people who existed when the planet—the galaxy, even—was a ball of fire and steam. And not like us at all. No, not like you either, though you are black. In all the records there is but one sentence about these Allmuseri, and that from a Spanish explorer named Rafael García, whose home is now an institution for the incurably insane in Havana.” He was silent again, biting down hard on the stem of his pipe. “I do not feel good about this cargo, Calhoun.”

“That sentence,” I asked him. “What did Garcia say?”

Cringle stared back to the sea, leaning on the rail, his voice blurred, then obliterated by the wind; I had to strain to hear him. “Sorcerers!” he said. “They're a whole tribe—men, women, and tykes—of devil-worshiping, spell-casting wizards.”

Forty-one days after leaving New Orleans, we coasted in on calm waters, a breeze at our backs, and the skipper set all hands to unmooring the ship, bringing her slowly like a hearse to anchorage alongside the trading post at Bangalang. It was a rowdy fort, all right. Cringle told me the barracoons were built by the Royal African Company in 1683—one of several well-fortified western forts always endangered by hostile, headhunting natives nearby, by competing merchants, and over two centuries residents at the fort had fought first the Dutch, then the French for control of Negro slaves. Lately, it had fallen into the soft, uncallused hands of Owen Bogha, the halfbreed son of a brutal slave trader from Liverpool and the black princess of a small tribe on the Rio Pongo. He was a sensualist. A powdered fop and Anglophile who dyed his chest and pubic hairs blond and, as did other men of the day plagued by head lice big as beans, shaved his pate and wore perfumed wigs. Educated in England, this man Bogha, who greatly enjoyed wealth and the same gaming tables played by Captain Falcon in Paris, returned to take advantage of his father's property and mother's prestige in Bangalang, overseeing from his great hilltop home the many warehouses, bazaars, harems, and Moslem caravans
that crawled from the interior during the Dry Season. The skipper stayed at his home most nights, consuming stuffed fish and raisin wine, and giving Bogha news of “civilization” back in England and America—he was starving for news, claimed Bogha, in this filthy, Godforsaken hole. And Cringle, being an officer, was invited too, but said he couldn't abide flesh merchants; in fact, he abhorred everything about Bangalang, and slept instead with the rest of the crew on deck in the open air to escape the heat below.