Chesapeake

  One young black, apparently as strong as Cudjo, perceived that when the elders nominated him it meant trouble, so he broke loose and would have run to the forest, except that Abu Hassan himself raised his gun, aimed it with great precision and shot the man dead. A young woman began to scream, and as long as that was all she did the Arabs ignored her, but when she tried to run to the body of her dead companion, Abu Hassan swung the butt of his rifle in a fierce circle and knocked her unconscious. An iron collar and chain were fastened to her as she lay in the dust.

  Nineteen of the finest young people of the village were so collected and chained. The black headman also offered to sell six others, but they were not strong and the Arabs rejected them. One of these, a woman with child, tried to stay with her enchained husband, and when she became difficult, Abu Hassan shot her.

  The chain binding the nineteenth prisoner was now welded to the dragging chain of the twenty-two brought north from the impoverished villages, and a procession containing forty-one future slaves started its long march west to Luanda, the Portuguese port on the Atlantic Ocean where cargoes of slaves would be collected in the barracoons until enough had been gathered to fill a ship headed for Cuba.

  Cudjo, watching as the Arabs in charge of the enchained slaves lashed their charges to get them started right, trembled with rage. The best young people of the river were being taken, and they had been designated for this fate by their own leaders, who were now rewarded for their duplicity with a trivial collection of beads and cloth and iron axes. Abu Hassan had brought his nine assistants not to trade but to forge iron collars and to drive long lines of slaves into the barracoons. When the procession was gone, Abu Hassan and his helpers loaded their canoes and prepared to descend upon Cudjo’s village.

  To forestall them, he departed swiftly and sped through the jungle on foot, hoping to reach his sequestered boat before the Arabs progressed to that point, for if they got started down the river first, he would not be able to pass them and alert his village. Therefore he ran until his lungs were on fire.

  He reached the river in good time, broke loose his hidden boat and started paddling furiously. Never before had he been so aware of the Xanga, its bending trees and darting birds. It was a river to cherish, and all who lived along it were now in peril.

  Without rest he kept his powerful shoulders working until at last he rounded the bend which protected his village. Some children saw him approaching, paddling as if fiends were at his back, and they shouted that Cudjo was returning. This produced an unexpected result: the old men of the council hurried to the shore, suspicious of what message he might be bringing. And when his boat neared the landing, it was they who moved in to surround him.

  “Abu Hassan!” he cried, but before he could speak further he caught a glimpse of some man, Akko it must have been, sneaking up behind him. As he turned to meet this adversary, the man brought a heavy club down upon his head and he lost consciousness.

  When he awakened he found himself gagged and bound by a heavy iron collar from which a chain led to a tree. He was guarded by an Arab with a gun, and there was no way he could communicate with his villagers; if he tried to scream, the gag muffled his voice; if he tried to escape the Arab, the iron collar choked him. But he must in some way arouse the men and women to the peril about to engulf them.

  Before he could devise any tactic, he had to watch in horror as the village leaders assembled the people, while the Arabs, including even the one who had been guarding him, took up positions with their guns ready. He tried to shout a warning, but he could make no noise. He turned his attention to the chain where it was twined about the tree, but even he could not break it loose.

  Helpless, he saw the village elders begin to nominate the young people they were willing to sell: this stout lad, that promising girl, the young man who had stolen the cow, anyone the village wished to get rid of. Then he gasped. The old men designated Luta, the girl he had tried to purchase for his wife. She screamed, but Abu Hassan clubbed her into silence.

  At this point Cudjo managed to work the gag out of his mouth, and with great brassy voice, shouted, “Resist them! Don’t accept the chains!”

  Abu Hassan, hearing the dangerous alarm, directed one of his men to silence the black, but when the Arab approached, Cudjo summoned extra-human powers and shattered his chain at the tree. Swinging the loose end about his head, he rushed at the man and felled him. He then raged toward the doomed prisoners, trying to rouse them to revolt, but before he could take more than a few steps, Abu Hassan raised his gun to shoot him. This proved unnecessary, because Akko, for the second time, clubbed Cudjo and he fell to his knees, and quickly his dangling chain was welded to that of a man he had known since childhood. Together they would make the long march to the sea.

  Twenty-three men and women comprised the convoy, but the smiths had prepared twenty-seven collars, and to march with a partial complement, utilizing guards, would be a waste. So when the column was formed and about to start west, Abu Hassan brushed aside the village elders whom he had paid for their help, and pointed to three likely young men and one healthy-looking woman.

  “Add them to the chain,” he ordered, and the guards grabbed the four and pinioned them until iron collars could be clapped about their necks. The first to be trussed was Akko.

  “Not him!” one of the faithless chiefs called. “He’s my son!”

  “Take him,” Hassan ordered, and the welding was completed. But when the old man saw his son in chains, destined for a land no one could comprehend except that it was far away, he began to wail, and grab Hassan, and make a nuisance of himself.

  Hassan shoved him away, but now the parents of the other three unexpected captives began to mount a confused demonstration, and there was such noise that Hassan lost his temper and made an extraordinary decision.

  “Take them all to Luanda.”

  “The entire village?” one of the blacksmiths asked.

  “Everybody!”

  “It’s six hundred miles. They can’t possibly live.”

  “Some will.”

  So the entire village was whipped into line behind the chained young people. One hundred and nineteen infants and elders started an impossible trek through the Congo jungles toward a goal most of them would never reach. Up front, two armed Arab guards. Beside the chained prisoners, two others with guns ready. Then the mass of villagers guarded by Abu Hassan himself, with two guards straggling at the rear, ready to gun down anyone attempting to flee. The two remaining Arabs had gone down the Xanga toward the Congo with canoe loads of ivory and rhinoceros horn.

  It was a preposterous march, a petulant act of vengeance not uncommon in these waning days of the slave trade. In 1832 every step in the vile business was cynical, ruthless and illegal. Black leaders sold their followers for baubles; Arabs chanting the Koran organized the marches; Christians intent on saving souls managed the barracoons; renegade captains transported the slaves in proscribed ships; and in Cuba pariah dealers risked buying them on the chance that they could be smuggled into the southern states, where importation of new slaves was forbidden.

  Of course, the kidnapping of blacks out of Africa had long been outlawed, by the United States in 1792, by Great Britain in 1807, by France in 1815, but such restriction merely made the rewards for contraband extra tempting; plantation owners in the Caribbean, Brazil and the southern states continued to offer extravagant bids for prime hands, and recreant captains could always be found willing to run the blockade.

  It was on his segment of the massive gamble that Abu Hassan was now engaged. He had set out from the Xanga with twenty-seven prime blacks in chains and one hundred and nineteen as an undifferentiated mass. He hoped to get at least twenty-two of the chained slaves to Luanda and not less than thirty of the others. If he could do that, he could show a fine profit, what with the earlier shipments he had dispatched from villages farther south. In fact, if he ran into no unusual difficulties, he stood a chance to fill an entire ship with his slaves a
lone, in which case he could dicker with the captain for a maximum price.

  He was not concerned, therefore, when the older villagers began to die off. As a matter of expediency, he was even willing to abandon those who must soon die, so as the line of marchers forded one river after another, it became smaller and tighter. It was a good march, one of his best, for he had not yet lost a single black in chains, and they were the ones on which his basic profit would depend.

  For the blacks so chained, the march was a hideous experience. For more than forty days in heat and rain each man would march and sleep and evacuate his bowels attached to two others; for a young woman chained between two men the journey was almost unbearable, but on the procession went.

  Cudjo, chained somewhere near the middle, bore the long trek better than most, but it became apparent to the guards that in spite of his chains he endeavored constantly to maneuver himself so that he could kill Akko, the unfortunate who had twice betrayed him. Akko appealed to the guards for protection. They would have preferred shooting Cudjo, but he was too valuable a property, so they contented themselves with lashing him, or beating him in the face with their gun butts whenever he made a move toward his enemy.

  Forestalled in that direction, he was equally powerless to aid Luta, who was chained to Akko, for any move in her direction was interpreted by both Akko and the guards as an attack on him. Once one of the Arabs smashed a gun into Cudjo’s instep, and it seemed for a while that Abu Hassan might have to shoot him because he fell so lame that he could not keep up. But he summoned new reserves and dragged his painful foot along.

  His mother and father died almost together on the thirtieth day. Abu Hassan, looking at the wasted bodies, was not unhappy to see them fall. Fifty-one had died off, leaving only the strongest, and it seemed likely that he would be reaching Luanda with far more than the mere thirty extras he had calculated.

  But on the fortieth day heavy rains struck, and fevers from the swamps caused severe loss of life. Two of the women in chains died and twelve of the others, so that Hassan’s potential profits were slashed. This enraged him, and when the chains on the two dead women had to be removed, he abused the blacksmith so severely that the poor man simply ripped the collars off, lacerating the corpses horribly. The file moved on.

  On June 10, the fifty-ninth day, Abu Hassan led his company into the outskirts of Luanda, the thriving Portuguese city perched on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Leaving his charges in an improvised encampment near the city, he went’ alone into Luanda to arrange for the orderly sale of his blacks. He discovered to his irritation that no slavers were in harbor at the moment, because two British warships were patrolling the seas to keep away any captains who might be thinking of a quick and profitable dash to the slave ports of the Caribbean. His only alternative would be to throw his slaves into one of the barracoons run by the Jesuits near the shore, so he tried to discover which of the huge pens contained his earlier shipments from Xanga, and at last found them.

  “Good passage for us,” his guards reported. Since they had started from the villages farthest south, where rivers feeding into the Congo system were shallower, they had not suffered heavy losses; also, they were herding only younger blacks in prime condition, so that their survival rate ought to have been superior.

  “Less than ten percent loss,” they said, congratulating themselves.

  “Come out and pick up the new arrivals,” Hassan directed, so the guards accompanied him to the temporary encampment, where with long-practiced eyes they evaluated the huddled blacks.

  “The twenty-five in chains look good,” they told Hassan. “These forty-one others? Not worth much.”

  “They’ll help fill the ship,” Hassan said defensively.

  “They won’t last long in Cuba,” the slavers said professionally. “Not many of them will be smuggled into America.”

  “They’ll help fill the ship,” Hassan repeated.

  “Shall we strike off the chains?” one of the guards asked.

  “No. It could be many weeks before a ship puts in,” Hassan warned. “The damned British.”

  He was right in his guess that the British would keep his slaves penned up, but he would have been outraged had he known why. There was in the complement of priests running the barracoons a young Portuguese of peasant stock; he was called Father João and he suffered from an incurable affliction: he took Jesus seriously. What he witnessed of the slave trade sickened him, and at great risk he had devised a system of signals to alert the British cruisers whenever the barracoons were filled, or whenever some especially daring slave ship was about to make a sortie into shore for a quick load of slaves.

  On the evening of the day when the first chain of Xanga slaves arrived, Father João had placed in the branches of a tree a white cloth, whereupon a lookout on the cruiser Bristol reported to his commander, “Sir, slaves have reached the barracoons.” No international commission had designated the Bristol to be the watchdog of the seas; an inflamed public opinion had demanded that the trade be halted, and this the captain was prepared to do.

  For two weeks his heavily armed ship patrolled the coastline of Portuguese Angola, enforcing respect from the captains of several fast ships which lurked beyond the horizon. If the Bristol challenged them to stand by for inspection, they did so, knowing that if their holds did not actually contain slaves, the watchman could do nothing. The slave ship might contain rings for fastening chains, and a ’tween deck for stowing blacks, from which even an idiot could deduce its business, but if it contained no actual slaves in bondage, it committed no offense, and while the English officers might look with scorn at the Americans operating the ship, they were powerless to do more.

  The blockade continued, with the British grim-lipped, the Americans cursing, the Arab businessmen desperate over the costs of feeding their slaves, and the blacks in the barracoons trying in vain to protect themselves. Since those great pens had no roofs, when rain came, as it often did from clouds scudding in from the Atlantic, they could only huddle together and wait for it to stop. When it did, the sun beat down with tropical ferocity, and now Abu Hassan began to fret, for not only did some of the older villagers begin to die, but his prime stock in chains began to fall sick.

  On no one did the degradation of the barracoon fall more heavily than on Luta. For more than thirteen weeks she had been chained between two young men only slightly older than herself; all her bodily functions were available for their inspection and theirs to hers. Beatings she did not have to fear; occasionally the Arab guards could bear no longer the tedium and the complaining, and they would go temporarily berserk, striking out at anyone, but intelligent slaves learned how to draw back from such short-lived assaults.

  But against the terrible indignity of being close-chained in a waiting pen, Luta had no defense. She might have died from sheer surrender of spirit had not Cudjo watched her from his distance, lending her encouragement and strength. Sometimes he would shout across the chains to her, words of fire and assurance, until one of the guards poked him with a musket, warning him to be silent. Then, during the long rains, he would simply watch her, and gradually she let him know that she was now determined to survive this awful experience, and he shouted for all to hear that he loved her.

  Six weeks had now elapsed since the various chains of slaves from the Xanga had been thrown into the barracoons, and Abu Hassan was beginning to suffer from the cost of maintaining his property. He was faced with a difficult dilemma: feed them less and save coins, or continue to feed them so that they would look better at the auction in Cuba. He rejected each alternative, retreating to a stratagem he had used once before: he sold the entire contents of his barracoon to the Jesuit fathers who owned it. “Let them take the risk,” he told his assistants.

  So the Arabs quit themselves of the Xanga slaves, pocketed a fair profit, and went to the bazaars to collect trade goods for the subornation of other tribes south of the Congo. Abu Hassan knew of nineteen other rivers feeding into the Sank
uru, each with a cluster of pitiful small tribes whose elderly leaders might be tricked into selling their best young people into the slave trade.

  “We’ll be back,” he assured the Jesuits. He could foresee the lucrative trade continuing indefinitely into the future; the British might try to interrupt it, for reasons he could not fathom, but there would always be daring ship captains willing to take the risks attendant upon enormous profits. “I just wish one of them had hurried up,” he said ruefully as he led his team out of Luanda. “We’d be leaving with bags of gold.”

  The Jesuits to whom he had sold his consignment did not wish to be in the slave trade; it was just that they owned the barracoons and had found that quite often it was to everyone’s advantage for them to step in as middlemen, pay the Arab slavers a reasonable fee, and themselves assume the risk of feeding the blacks and eventually delivering them to some ship captain for a small but comfortable profit.

  It was not this profit that the Jesuits sought; while they had the savages in their charge they Christianized them, and this was commendable because it meant that any blacks who might die on the long passage to Cuba would do so in the arms of Christ. Their souls would be saved.

  So now the beatings stopped and kindly young clerics raised on farms in Portugal visited the barracoons daily, explaining in mangled African phrases how Jesus watched over everyone, even those in chains, and how in a later and better life the slaves would meet Him personally and see for themselves His radiant generosity. Cudjo braced himself against the earnest young Portuguese, but Luta started talking with Father João, and the honest compassion that glowed in his eyes made his words consoling; when she pieced together all that Father João promised, it made sense, for she had always believed that there must be some god who ordained the movement of the stars and of people and even of the animals in the forest. And that this god or collection of gods should have sent a special son as intermediary was not difficult to accept. That this son should have been born of a virgin posed no insurmountable problem for her; in recent weeks, chained to her two companions, she had often wished that she could be incorporeal.