The slave ship
bandy legs, subservient somehow to the main two, laughed and jabbered
and clapped their shins. “Two great lords gaming,” said Colley, “and
their followers and cup-holders. I’ve seen the same when I had a look
one day at White’s.”
“This ship makes you sardonic,” I said. “I don’t know what it makes me.”
“There is,” he said, “a thoroughly abominable two months or rather
less, followed by a somewhat longer term of comparative happiness. I
live for the comparative happiness. We all do.”
I was looking at a woman seated with downcast eyes, a child of nine
across her knees. Now I saw that it was the woman who had cried to
me up the Daga River, who had two children at home. If she felt me
staring at her I do not know; perhaps she did. At any rate she raised
her eyes and stared back. She was hollow-eyed, her face and frame were
thin, her breasts hung lank. A dark light as of recognition entered her
countenance and turned into hatred, blank scorn and hatred. She stared
at me leaning there, then with a most deliberate insolence slowly
moved her body until I had only her dark back and shoulders and her
face was for the sea.
Colley had followed my eyes. “I thought she would die, that Eboe woman.
She would have gone, I’m pretty sure, but for the child. I worked it
so. I said--black lingo--‘You don’t want to leave her, now do you?’ and
it worked like one of their ju-jus.” He finished reflectively. “Mother
and young one like that are usually bought together, but not always so,
by any means. So it may be that she’ll have to leave her anyhow.”
In the middle of the swarm--the deck was black with them; they had
little room to move about--a man was laughing, a rich, subdued,
whole-hearted laughter.
“That fellow there must be clean of sin.”
“You laugh and I laugh.”
“Not like that----”
“If he’s clean of sin there’s one there--and there’s one there--who is
not.”
It was a sullen and violent brute to whom he pointed, and a crafty and
apelike one. “Yes,” I said, “they are mixed.”
Those nearest the barricade began to speak to us clamorously, men and
women. They made appeal for increase in the water ration, for more and
other food, for a little rum, for license to stay, when it came dark,
this side the hatches, for medicines, for news of where they were
and where going, for release, for return to Africa, for justice and
knowledge and joy and freedom. They made no discrimination--we were
white men--it was enough. We were in the magic, wizards and evil kings,
all! No one ever knew when gusts of passion and of desperation would
take them. Something of this kind happened now, appeared and spread
and mounted. From a few many become involved. There grew a dizziness
of faces and upswung arms. Voices ran the ladder of excitement into a
deep-throated yell. Like a levin flash came a certain tension. Colley
raised his voice. “‘Ware, Michaelson!’ Ware, Dory!” A man above us
shouted “Mr. Pomeroy! Trouble here, sir!”
Pomeroy was at hand, McNaughton came running. The deck showed now a
ferment as of determined bees. A leader started forth, then with a yell
there came, as a comber comes, a dark mass against the barricade where
they thought it weakest. Then I saw Bartram, tawny as a lion, with a
lion’s roar.
“Too late for soft words, Mr. McNaughton. The tall one, you, Dory!
Fire!”
Dory fired, and the tall one, the leader, fell. “Burke! Take that man
yonder!” and the one to whom Colley had pointed fell. The wave recoiled
upon itself, broke. A moan ran through and over like the moan of foiled
waters. Bartram shouted to the insurgents in their own tongue, “Who’ll
die next?”
This way and that they looked into the mouths of pistols and muskets,
and upon cutlasses that flashed and dazzled and made dread, and beside
these there was only the shoreless sea. They feared the sea that was
their severing foe, they feared the ship--sailed and tiered ships being
the highest magic,--they feared the white men’s guns and swords. Blight
struck them, they wilted, withered, sank into an abject, wailing or
silent mass.
The two dead men were lifted and thrown into the sea, and the blood
mopped from the deck. There was no further punishment. Bartram was not
sanguinary, nor loved in any way immoderation.
Days and nights--days and nights--days and nights, and the reeking
ship went on. Week on week until we had counted six. The log showed
an average voyage. There had been better, said Colley, and there had
been much worse. We lost three seamen, two in storm, one from sickness.
Others were ailing, but it was always so. There were four hundred and
seventy slaves on deck or under hatches. The loss of that thirty made
for them that much more room, but still a stranger would have wondered
where that thirty could have been stored.
We were now upon the Indies. I remember the cry of “Land ho!” and how
it thrilled, for there was none upon the _Janet_ who did not now
wish land.
CHAPTER XVII
And yet it was days between the sighting of the first of the Windward
Isles and the vision, like enchantment, of the Blue Mountain of Jamaica
that was twice as high as Ben Lomond.
These days were different from those before them. The run was all but
over, many dangers overpassed. The ration of water was doubled; the
slaves might have all they wished to eat. All the object was now that
ills be forgotten and the cargo seem and indeed be in the fittest
conceivable shape. It was Daga’s triumph to ship stout slaves; it was
the _Janet’s_ or the _Sherwood Oak’s_ or the _Fancy’s_ to deliver whole
and stout as many as might be. Ours were fed and cleansed, and given
oil to rub with, and at the last the most were unshackled. And they
were told tales of the goodness of the Indies.
There is something in the Negro of a vast good nature and a knowing how
to live. Tragic was this ship to him, and his own land was left behind
forever and forever, his land and kin and ways and tongue. He had not
left it of his own will, but was stolen, forced, dragged, wronged. He
was going to a world strange to him as the moon, and into slavery, and
the slavery he was already tasting was not sweet. And yet Great Nature
gave him humor and mirth, and the moment, on the _Janet_, physical
pain and oppression lessened, up and out they welled, like springs from
dark hillsides. Not from all but from many. And another thing. He is
a barbarian and a heathen, with images of stone and wood, but behind
that mask and that childhood yet, he is religious. David Scott found
that out of old in Virginia, and nothing ever changed his conviction
here. Not that it shows in every man and woman. In many it shows not
at all or most fitfully. But in the whole there is the tincture and
the mark. Even on the _Janet_ it rose in many or descended upon
many, and out of the black present sprang a bloom, a sense of a Future
that was different. David Scott saw that happen, and deep, deep in
him something knew what it was. It was there, behind or above all the
flows of passion, all the sluttishness.--Something in them, as in the
Africa they were leaving, dark and rank and strong, incredibly old and
incredibly childish. Something mirthful, despite the world. Something
savage, something grotesque, something shallow as the skin and deep as
the bone, something foolish, something passionate, something delighting
in music and drama, something religious, something warm and kind,
something good, something wise, after one of Nature’s many ways of
wisdom. It was all there; it showed on the _Janet_ as elsewhere.
Some were credulous of the tales that were told, some were not. John
Dory and Benjamin the steward were the ones set by custom to tell them.
Our slaves would like to have heard, I thought, from Tom and Don. But
Tom and Don avoided Africa, naked and chained; as little as might be
went that way or looked that way.
John Dory and Benjamin had been afoot through Jamaica, Barbadoes and
Trinidad, and on the steed of imagination across the Spanish and French
islands. I listened to them telling preposterous marvels of fat and
ease and plenty. One or the other or both sat cross-legged atop of
barricade and dealt out fairy tales in a mixture of Negro tongue and
sailor’s English. The four hundred and seventy listened, and woebegone
faces shortened and white teeth showed. What was dearest to them was
that they would meet a lot of their own folk--a lot of black skins--and
that these were universally happy, and that they, too, would be happy.
A woman shrilled at John Dory, “They won’t part me and him?” “Lord,
no!” said Dory.
We passed by the Bahamas, and saw the mountains of Cuba, and the
mountains of Santo Domingo and at last the mountains of Jamaica. The
_Janet_ was made as clean as was possible, the sick sailors seemed
to recover, fiddles sounded in the forecastle. The officers smiled;
around Bartram played like a beam of light, _The star that warred
does not return!_ The Middle Passage was gone over, the voyage
made, the luck fair.
The shores of Jamaica are gorgeous to see, under the golden light,
under the rose and purple when the sun is low. I gazed and gazed at the
peaky mountains and the vales between and thought I saw a paradise.
Dusk gathered, stars swam above the purple land, it seemed to me that
there was music. In the cabin after supper, McNaughton and Colley
having gone on deck, Bartram put out a detaining hand. “We’ll anchor
presently in Kingston harbor. And there, David, what is your will? Will
you be leaving me?”
“I hope the _Janet_ may be my home still,” I said, “until I know.”
“You do not know?”
“No.”
Opening a box beside him he took out golden guineas. “Here is what I
would have paid Philip Smith--a little more, maybe.”
“I’ll take just what you would have paid him.--Thank you, sir.”
“The _Janet_ will stay two weeks or more. North, that’s the agent
here, has a good enough house and decent connections and is a safe man.
If you want to see Jamaica he can put you in the way of it. It will
be best just to say that you’re my cousin who came out with me from
Bristol.”
“You’re very good to me, Captain Bartram.”
“Of course it must be ‘Captain’ before the warld of the ship. But when
we’re like this, David, it might be ‘Bartram’--for all that I’m a wheen
aulder than you.”
I said, “That’s as the warld counts it, Bartram. Inside, there’s no
telling which is the auldest or the youngest.”
“Guid!” he answered. “Have you a purse for your money?”
At midnight we anchored. At dawn all the slaves were let upon the deck.
The east reddened and threw a light against mountains and a broad
coastal plain, blue water breaking against the shore and a host of
cocoanut palms leaning from the land over the wave. We saw bright green
patches of sugar cane. The air breathed balm, one made out a kind of
houses among trees, and the crowing of cocks came faintly to the ear.
All the upturned dark faces!--It was not hideously, fearfully, unlike
Africa.--_It was like Africa!_
The sailors were making sail. Up came the anchor to a chantey.
A steaming breakfast went to the deck, and, with the Captain’s
compliments, a dram for each man and a smaller one for a woman.
Afterwards abundant water was given with which to bathe. They scrubbed
themselves and each other, while the cleaning gang below made the
slave deck sweeter than it had been since we laded at Daga. The wind
blew fair, the _Janet_ went hummingly, the great sun laughed
on flag and pennant and sails. Bartram sent Willy the fiddler to
play for Africa. Then out of the storeroom came cotton breeches and
shifts--slaves’ clothing, since English and Christian countries must
not be shocked by nakedness--even black nakedness, which in itself, so
comfortably has Nature arranged it, shocks much less than does white