THE BOOK OF NEGROES (24 page)

Chekura awoke and found our hands together. He turned his head my way. “A husband needs his wife,” he said to me. “Would you love me now?”

The soft morning light bathed his face, and I noticed a wrinkle or two at the corners of his eyes. This man had once walked with me for three moons, all the way to the coast of our homeland. This man had risked his life time and again to visit me at night by the indigo fields of St. Helena Island. He had lost half a finger and all of his hair, but none of his love for me. A long-buried desire clicked at the back of my throat. I felt the same warmth and wetness that I had felt during the thousands of nights that I had missed Chekura, but this time he was here with me and he was mine.

I had no idea when I would see him again and wanted to savour every moment that we had. Licking and touching every inch of his skin, I basked in the smell and the sweat of him and felt my passion rising under his tongue and his fingers as they circled and teased and devoured me.
Our lips met. I brought just the very tip of him into me and we stayed like that, kissing and licking and slowly rocking. I moaned as his lips tickled my nipples and his thumb slid against the hard, extended ridge of my womanhood. Chekura arched and slid deep inside me and we inhaled life one from the other. The sound of his breathing and gasping brought me to the peak of my own pleasure. Once, twice, three times I shook and shuddered as my husband spilled himself deep inside me and we cried out together. We held on to each other long after we were both spent, and kissed once more before we fell asleep.

I awoke to find him tracing my cheeks with the fingers of one hand. He smiled at me faintly, and I knew that he had to leave soon.

“Do you know what happened to Mamadu?” I asked.

“He was sold down in Georgia,” he said.

“Who told you?”

“Different folks. News came up from the fishnet.”

“How come you heard if I never did?”

“I was working down in Georgia. Three long years I spent down there. I heard on the rice plantation that he had been sold off, and then later that you had been sent away. When I heard that, I thought about drowning myself.”

I stroked the back of his hand. “You never know when you might see your wife again,” I said.

“Maybe that’s what stopped me,” he said. Chekura sat up cross-legged on the bed. “I don’t like this man Lindo. He keeps you here all alone and doesn’t even leave food for you when he’s gone.”

“He’s better than most,” I said. “Never beat me, I can say that.”

“I heard talk about Lindo in the fishnet.”

“What sort of talk?”

“It came some time after Mamadu was sold. I knew your friends on St. Helena and the nearby islands were asking where he had gone. And
in Georgia, I started asking after him everywhere I went. Every time I met a Negro who was coming or going, I sent out word in the fish-net. Somebody, somewhere, had to know about my son. A year or two later, word came back: Mamadu had been sold to a family in Georgia. In Savannah. I would have kept on asking in the fishnet. I would have found that family and killed someone. But the pox came through the town and our baby died.”

“He did?” I reached again for Chekura’s hand and gripped it hard.

“About a year after he was sold.”

“What family was this?” I asked.

“I don’t know the name—but Solomon Lindo arranged the sale,” Chekura said.

“How do you know it was him?”

“That’s how it came up the fishnet. It was a rich white family in Savannah. They had a slave wet-nurse in the house. A wet-nurse born in Africa. When our dark-skinned baby arrived with no parents in sight, the wet-nurse sent out word through the fishnet.”

“What, exactly, did she say?”

“The man who set up the sale was ‘Lindo, the indigo Jew.’ That’s what I heard. The wet-nurse said ‘the indigo Jew’ was with the family when the baby arrived. He was paid a fee, and then he left.”

I ran down the stairs and shut myself into the outhouse. I cried until I began to cough, and coughed until I vomited. Finally, emptied and numb, I returned upstairs. Chekura had not moved an inch.

“And the baby is dead?” I said. “You are sure he is dead?”

“Heard it three times in the fishnet. Three people brought me the news, and none of them knew the others. They knew I was the father of the baby who arrived with no parents in Savannah, and they knew the wet-nurse. She told each of them. She said pox carried off the baby in 1762.”

I sat for a long while in silence. Finally, Chekura told me he couldn’t stay much longer. He had his man to meet at noon, on Broad Street.

We walked into town together. I used a blue glass with rum to buy two pieces of cooked sea bass, two buns and two oranges from a woman in the morning market. We ate them among the crowds of people—black, mulatto, mustee and white—coming and going in the morning.

“Do you want me to kill him?” Chekura said.

“Are you going to kill Appleby too? And every white man who brought us here?”

“It’s just Lindo I want,” he said. “Right here in town, he’s one I could get. I could come at night and nobody would see me.”

“They might not see you, but I would know,” I said. “Killing him won’t bring back our baby. I want you to stay alive, and I want you to stay good.”

“You want me to stay good?”

“There’s been enough killing in our lives. And you’re no killer anyway. You’re still the runt of a lad who was too foolish to run away before they chained you up and threw you in the ship.”

“I would have run from the slavers, but I knew you were heading across the big river and I wanted to go with you.”

I gave a tiny smile. “Nice try,” I said. “You were a fool but you were good. If you stay good, come back and stick around a little longer next time—you never know what might happen. I might just marry you.”

“And now you tell me,” he said. He gave me a long, sweet look, holding me with his eyes just as deeply and as fiercely as any man could use his body.

It was time for Chekura to go. At noon he had a man to meet—the same man who had given him a night off and who now had to be guided through the low-country waterways. I spread my hands and brought my fingers to Chekura’s. Together, our hands resembled the skeleton of a
house. I pressed a little harder against the pads of his fingertips, which were smooth and soft despite the years. When Chekura smiled, I could see deep creases at the corners of his mouth. “Goodbye, my dear wife,” he said.

A white man was watching us from across the street. It had to be the one who owned him.

I couldn’t bring myself to smile, and I had no more words. I pressed Chekura’s fingertips one last time, and then my man was gone.

SOLOMON LINDO RETURNED after being away for a month. I had caught two babies in his absence, but received nothing but a flask of rum, a pouch of tobacco and a yard of cloth dyed with indigo.

Lindo sent his sister home, spent a day doing business and then called me into his office.

“I have seen the accounts,” he said. “You owe me two pounds.”

I would not look at him.

“I expect an answer when I speak,” he said.

In a low monotone, I said: “You owe me much more than silver.”

“You’re to pay me ten shillings a week, but in my absence you didn’t leave a thing with my sister.”

“I have nothing to give you. And there are other things on my mind.”

Lindo snorted. “I have lost my position as the official indigo inspector—and would you like to know why?”

I ignored his question. What did I care about his indigo problems?

“Because,” he continued, “there isn’t enough being produced to merit my inspections. If I don’t get the British to increase the bounty, and if we don’t see the price rising on international markets, the Carolina indigo economy will collapse.”

“And what does that have to do with me?”

He slammed his fist on the desk. “I keep you clothed and I keep you fed,” he shouted. “You live better in this home than any servant in town. There will be no clothes, no meals, no benefits, and no support until you pay your way. Ten shillings a week, and not a penny less.”

“I can’t pay you money that is not paid to me,” I said.

“Then you are not to go out, unless it is to do midwifery work or other tasks that I assign.”

“So will you now start saying ‘slave,’ instead of ‘servant’?” He grabbed my wrist and pulled me to him. I could feel his breath on my forehead.

“You will cook and you will do as I say.”

“I will not.”

I tried to yank my wrist free but he held it firmly. With his other hand, he slapped me in the face. Then he let me go.

My cheek burned. I stared into his eyes until he turned his head.

“Forgive me,” he said quietly, looking down. “I don’t know what got into me. I am not myself now that Mrs. Lindo is gone.”

“You cannot blame everything on your grief,” I said. When he looked up, I spoke once more. “You sold my son.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. Robinson Appleby sold your son.”

“You helped him. And you were paid to do it. You sold my son to a family in Savannah, Georgia.”

“Who told you this?”

“Some Hebrew you are. And you say you’re not a white man.”

“Have you been going through my papers?”

I thought that he might strike me, or rip off my clothes and force himself on me. I thought that he might shove me out the door and leave me
to fend for myself on the streets of Charles Town. But Solomon Lindo did none of those things. He sat down heavily and asked me to join him. I refused, and stood with arms crossed.

“I do not expect you to understand, but there is more to the truth than you know.”

There was nothing more for me to say, because I did not care for Solomon Lindo and his truths.

OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, Lindo moved at all times with reluctance and heaviness. We settled into an uneasy truce. I did not make any more payments to him, and he provided me neither food nor clothing nor whale oil nor assistance of any kind other than the right to sleep in his backhouse unmolested.

I received no more midwifery work from the Jews of Charles Town, and the Anglican slave owners would pay in nothing but the smallest quantities of rum and tobacco. I traded them with difficulty in the town markets. I had to start drawing my last good red wrap more tightly around my waist and hips, and it too started to fray.

Solomon Lindo cut me out of his bookkeeping work, and began to take meals in his sister’s home. For the first time since I had come to Charles Town, I felt gnawing hunger every day. White people in the markets mumbled to each other about being enslaved by the King of England, but I had stopped listening to their complaints.
Liberty to the Americans. Down with slavery.
They weren’t talking about the slavery I knew or the liberty I wanted, and it all seemed ludicrous to me.

Against all reason and logic, I waited and hoped for Chekura’s return. He had said he might be coming back. But no voice called out my African name, and no feet climbed the steps to greet me in the night. I watched for him in the streets and the markets, but Chekura was not to
be found. I even looked to the Charles Town newspapers, in case anyone was advertising for a runaway “servant” by the name of Chekura. But the papers said that the British had taken over the Spanish lands to the south. In a hostile town and with a highly patrolled low-country filled with sentries, guards, man-traps and plantation owners who shot Negro trespassers, I knew that he was as unlikely to make it safely to Charles Town again as I was to travel undetected to Lady’s Island. There was nowhere to go and no place left to hide.

Three months after he had returned from New York City, Solomon Lindo told me to join him in his parlour. I hadn’t set foot in his house in ages, and couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten to my fill.

“It would appear that we are both suffering,” Lindo said, “and I am going to end this standoff. I must travel again to New York City. I have one more opportunity to argue in favour of the indigo bounty.” Lindo handed me a platter of bread, cheese and fruit, as well as a bundle of clothes. “Take this food and these things to cover yourself, for it is not right for me to let you wither away.”

I thought he was going to sell me, but the man who claimed that he was not white surprised me one more time.

“The ship sails tomorrow at ten in the morning,” he said. “Make yourself ready for eight o’clock sharp. I have decided to take you with me. We will be gone for a month. I will ensure that you are fed, and that you are clothed for the northern climate. You will write letters, do my books and run errands. Perhaps we can thus repair the damage between us. But go now, please, for I have work to finish.”

I decided to travel with him in the morning. It would be my Exodus. With a bit of luck, I would never return to the Province of South Carolina.

THE ABOLITIONISTS SUSPECT that my time left is limited, and I cannot deny it. It is as if my lungs have been granted a precise number of breaths. Now that the limit draws near, I can almost see the number written in the patterns of the clouds at sunset. In the morning, I awaken faintly troubled. The sunset remains in my mind at all times of day, but I try not to dwell on it, or to let it prevent me from taking each day as a new gift. I have not embraced a God as might be imagined by a Muslim, Jew or Christian, but in the mornings it comforts me to imagine a gentle voice saying,
Go ahead, that’s it, take another day.

I am no longer worked to the bone, nor do I struggle every hour to fill my belly or cover my head, and I find it easy to make one new discovery every day. Recently, I discovered that something happens when people realize they may never see you again. They expect wisdom from you. And they want you near to them during great moments.

Yesterday the jolly abolitionist—Sir Stanley Hastings, as the rest of the world knows him—finally prevailed upon me to accompany him to Sunday service. He had been at me for some time, and I could procrastinate no longer.

We attended his church, which, he said, was the only respectable house of worship in the city. True to his word, he kept vigil over me throughout the ordeal, propping me up on every leaning side. On our way into the building, passing under an archway of timeless stones and echoes, men and women of every persuasion and under every imaginable wig or hat flocked toward me for an introduction.

“We have heard they will be bringing you out soon,” one said.

“We hear the date is nearing for the parliamentary committee,” another said.

“We hear that you can quote from Voltaire and Swift,” a third said.

“Only when my own words fail me,” I replied, which earned a round of laughter.

When the bishop stood, I finally got to rest my weary backside on a pew. The first pew, no less. Sir Stanley whispered that nearly a thousand people sat behind us, and I had the sensation of twice that number of eyes boring into the deep brown skin of my neck. Suffice it to say that mine was the only skin of that hue inside that sacred building. I found it enervating to be stared at by the bishop as he took to his pulpit, and by all the congregationists behind me. I sought nothing but sleep and the comfort of a quiet, solitary room. My eyelids dropped like bricks, and yet I strove to hold them up. I had no wish to disgrace my valiant host, so I sat as still and erect as the white Anglicans of London, dreaming with eyes open of a warm bed and a feather pillow.

The people of Great Britain and other seafaring nations have devised unspeakable punishments for the children of Ham, but in that moment and in that time, none seemed worse than their own self-inflicted torture:
to sit, unmoving but forbidden to sleep, in a cavernous room with arching stone and forbidden windows while a small man adopted a monotone for the better part of a villainous hour.

I did my level best to remain upright. If I closed my eyes only halfway, surely nobody could tell that I was escaping through dreams of other lands and other times. I thought of my mother, who had seemed so wise and old to me when I was but a child. Even as one takes the last steps of life, one seems still to long for the slow, rocking movement of a mother’s arms. Rocking. My body was rocking. I had a moment of a nightmare, in which the rocking of a mother’s arms turned into the rocking of a ship. I lurched in the pew. Sir Stanley’s hand briefly touched my arm. I bolted up, hot, alarmed, embarrassed. My eyes lifted open. The bishop was still droning in a voice invented solely to tempt an old woman with sleep.

The mass of people rose about me, and I followed them. I stood when they prayed, waited while they sang, kneeled when they did, and sat back on the pew with what little grace I could muster. No wonder there wasn’t a single solitary man or woman of African extraction in the church. If allowed to come, would they endure this hour of purgatory?

Could every Anglican ear possibly be tuned to the ever-mumbling bishop, who now offered words about resurrection and the everlasting? I heard something about the Israelites and the Promised Land, but my body ached for a horizontal position. One day soon I would tumble into that bed and from it rise no longer. But not yet. My eyes opened a little wider.
Not yet, please
.

I would need energy and vigour when speaking to the parliamentary committee. I would need lift in my legs, that day, and a whiff of my old passion. Alas, I had reached that fine age when it was easier to speak than to be spoken to. At that point in the service, it struck me that the last person on earth with a right to speak to any other was a diminutive Anglican bishop with no rolling of the eyes, no flailing of the hands, no
kick in his legs and no crashing into the arms of Jesus. Come hell or high water, I would not be talked back into any Anglican church in this lifetime. If God had to be saluted, let it be among the Baptists of Birchtown or Freetown. At least they danced when they called out to Jesus, and hollered loud enough to keep the half-dead awake.

I managed to keep my chin up, and my eyelids sufficiently open to avoid detection. It was not pleasant to sit still in church, but that was no reason to embarrass Sir Stanley Hastings, his wife and five children.

Near the end of the service, I was shaken from my stupor one last time as the masses rose to sing. And I stood among them, fully awake this time. My heels were throbbing. They felt like they had been stripped of all padding, and now consisted of bone and bone only. As I stood righteously awake, with heels and every other part of me aching for the service to end, something happened to ease my discomfort and to prick up my ears. I heard voices. A thousand voices. The voices of all the good Anglicans were coming together.

When I caught the melody, it seemed faintly, distantly, impossibly familiar. Where had I heard it before?

The voices went on, and I dug deep into my memory. Was it in Charles Town that I had heard that song? No. New York? No, not there either. Where, then?

Britons? Slaves? What nonsense was this? I listened again. The words were impossible. But it was not the lyrics I remembered. It was the music. What on blessed earth could this song be, and how was it that I somehow recognized its lift and its optimism?

I tried to hold on to the words and turn them over in my mind.
Nations not so blest as thee, Shall in their turns to tyrants fall.
I glanced to my right. Sir Stanley Hastings was singing passionately, mouth like a baby robin in the spring. And then it came again. The chorus. The part that seemed most familiar of all. A sound that brought rousing passion to the good Anglican churchgoers and made them sing as lustily as I had ever heard white people sing.

That was it. There. Now I remembered. It wasn’t New York. Or Charles Town. It was earlier, much earlier. It was on the slave ship. In the cabin, beneath the decks, with the medicine man. He used to like to sing sometimes, and I had no idea whatsoever of his meaning. He was ailing, I supposed, and perhaps even mad, and sometimes in the middle of the night, when he had taken too much from the bottle and already soiled another woman from my homeland, he would lie in his bed, facing the low ceiling, and over the thrashing of the waves and the slapping of the sails he would shout out the chorus over and over again.

For an audience, he had only the parrot in its covered cage, and me, lying rigidly beside him.

Unaware of English, and unaccustomed to white folk, and not even a woman yet but dangerously close to becoming one, I would lie as still as I could in the medicine man’s bed and wonder what he was singing. Let him sing, I thought, because his hands don’t touch me when he sings. Let him sing, I thought, hoping to spend just one more night out of reach of his thick, hairy fingers. Let him sing, I thought, ashamed that he spent himself on women from my land. The misfortune of those women was my good luck, their misery my escape.

Never never never
were the last words I heard, until perceiving shouts of alarm from the men and women all around me. I must have fainted dead away. Sir Stanley Hastings had clearly caught me in my fall, for as I came to I was laid out straight on the wooden pew. Finally. The position I had sought for a full hour.
Never never never
… I was no longer with the medicine man, no longer a six-foot toss from the coldest grave on earth, but back in the Anglican church, stretched out on a hard wooden pew, under the protection of the most venerated abolitionist in England. Sir Stanley Hastings’ firm hand kept me from sliding off the pew. I kept my eyes shut and wondered what to do. The Anglicans were in a state of vocal agitation, and Sir Stanley Hastings the most.
I plead with you, people, please stand back. Please. Back. Our noble visitor has fainted, surely due to the
excitement of our faith, but fear not. We shall revive her. Here. She has a pulse. She is still breathing. Stand back please, and we shall aid her. All she needs is a little air.

I kept my eyes closed until they carried me into the sun.