Debra soon set up her own business—a curio shop for visiting sailors. With my help as an interpreter, Debra bought sculptures, masks, ceremonial knives, little wood carvings of elephants, necklaces and ivory bracelets from the Temne traders, and sold them at a profit to sailors who wanted to take trinkets back to England. The fastest-selling items were tiny sculptures carved out of camwood. The deep reddish brown colour of the wood appealed to the sailors. Debra polished the sculptures with palm oil—little elephants, alligators and monkeys. But sailors couldn't resist the sculptures of young, bare-breasted women. They could rarely pay in silver, but they gave Debra rum, iron pots, small cauldrons, iron bars, or clothing from England, and Debra was always able to give these to the Temne in exchange for food, or firewood or building services. The Temne were quick learners in the art of building the wooden, often elevated houses that pleased the settlers so much—and as a result Debra and her daughter, Caroline, were soon established in their own house and they lived in it well.
Apart from trading with the Temne and visiting sailors, we also depended on supplies from the Sierra Leone Packet, a Company vessel that sailed back and forth between Freetown and England.
One day, a few hundred of us gathered by the wharf to watch a ship unload. We had been hoping for boxes of hammers and nails, but in the
crates we found three hundred clay watering pots.
"What's this?" Daddy Moses asked, when I put one in his hands.
"A clay pot," I said.
"Pardon me?"
"A watering pot. We just got three hundred of them. No hammers, though, and no nails either."
"Girl, you need to write those white folks a letter. Tell them we don't have any gardens, just yet, and that with all the rain we don't need their clay watering pots."
I never wrote to the Company, but I did write to Sam Fraunces and Theo McArdle, when Clarkson explained that the letters would be sent to America after reaching England. I liked to imagine my words travelling across the seas, and I hoped that one day a letter might come back for me.
THE COMPANY HIRED ME TO TEACH CHILDREN and adults how to read and write, and Clarkson—who said writing brought on his headaches— gave me extra work preparing reports to the directors in London. As his occasional secretary, I was sometimes rowed out to his ship to work with him in a large cabin that had been turned into an office.
"Would you not rather live on land?" I asked him one day.
"I am a Navy man," he said, "and I find it more peaceful out here on the water. I have time to think, and people cannot just bang on my door and barge in while I'm concentrating."
"If the Company asked you to be superintendent of the colony, why do you let the other managers take over almost everything?"
"I am happy to leave them to it," Clarkson said. "And it would strain my good relations with the Nova Scotians if I had to enforce all of the Company rules."
"They are not the rules you had anticipated?"
Clarkson lifted his palms in the air, but would only say, "One can't anticipate everything."
When my writing work was done, Clarkson invited me to sit with him for tea.
"It must be lonely for you, without your fiancée," I said.
Cracking his knuckles, he acknowledged that it was true.
He encouraged me to read some of his London newspapers, and while I did that, he read a book. It was the first time in my life that I had felt connected to another person, merely by dint of our sitting in the same space and reading together. I felt that I shared a good moment with him, even though we didn't speak much. Actually, I appreciated that he did not enquire into the state of my own heart. Returning to Africa could not bring back all the people I had lost. But in Sierra Leone, I found myself less burned by longing for my daughter, perhaps because I had stopped looking for her in every child I saw. Wherever May was, she certainly wasn't in Africa.
IN THE EARLY MONTHS, the only way that most settlers could survive was to work for the Company, and thereby receive wages and provisions. Although the Company had promised that our provisions would be free for the first months, within a month or two we were brought down to half rations. And soon enough, if we wanted food, we had to draw it at the company store in exchange for labour. But there was never work, every day, for every person in the colony. And although a skilled labourer could make two shillings a day, he had to pay four shillings a week for provisions. The Company infuriated the Nova Scotians by charging exorbitant rates for salt fish, beef and poultry, and by watering down its alcohol. Nonetheless, drink and religion shot up side by side in our colony.
Within months of arriving, six different religious denominations had established their own meeting houses—at first tents, then huts, then wooden chapels. They rang with singing and praying through the night. The people of Freetown knew nothing of sleep, or else learned to sleep through pandemonium. In any given night, you could hear the tam-tams beating from King Jimmy's town half a mile away, and you could hear visiting sailors staggering and singing and falling down in the streets, and arguments and palavers between settlers—who killed whose duck, for example, or who made eyes at whose woman. You could hear men beating men, men beating women, and yes, women beating men. And through it all rang the amens and the hallelujahs of the churchgoers.
One Nova Scotian by the name of Cummings Shackspear had brought supplies with him from Halifax, including seven barrels of rum. I never learned how he managed to accumulate all that rum before sailing, or under what false pretenses he got it loaded on board his ship in Halifax, but he had the barrels sealed by the most able coopers of Halifax, and was still in possession of his huge store of drink by the time he opened a tavern two blocks back from the water. Some parishioners would emerge from church sweating and exhausted, and get straight to drinking. Fewer tavern-goers left off their drinking to go straight to church.
Cummings watered down his rum—no worse than the Company—and sold it by the glassful. He raked in enough money to keep up his supply and he gave up on the Company goods. They tried to extract exorbitant dues and didn't like selling to him anyway, but there were enough passing ships—trading vessels, slaving vessels, British military vessels—and Cummings was usually able to buy a few barrels of rum in exchange for goods he was able to obtain, sometimes, from Temne traders: ivory, camwood, or even occasionally large stores of pineapple, puncheons of fresh water, goats, poultry and the like. He built a storehouse for his goods directly behind his tavern, and hired a Temne native to guard it at night. His place of drink became known as Shackspear's Book. Sailors knew its reputation and went looking for it the moment they got off their yawls.
Cummings did such a business that he soon no longer depended on the goodwill of the Company, and divorced himself from the politics of the struggles between the settlers and the Company. Few, however, could afford such a luxury.
I never had a mind for business, and the services that I offered—reading and writing lessons by evening in the backroom of my house, medical care for the sick, who needed me especially because Company doctors were generally drunk or dying—never brought many rewards, but kept me from depending totally on the British for my survival. During the mornings, I continued to teach at the Company school.
King Jimmy and his people lived just a mile or two away, and by the time I'd been in Freetown for a year I had come to understand that he was pressuring John Clarkson to pay him for the use of Temne lands. Nobody had told us prior to arriving in Sierra Leone, but it gradually dawned on us that King Jimmy's men had raided and sacked the earlier colony of black settlers from England, and that they did not accept the terms under which the British claimed they had purchased the African land. King Jimmy's favourite method of pressure was to send dozens of canoes full of warriors past our shores at night, whooping and hollering and beating drums as they went. It frightened the daylights out of the Nova Scotians, who pleaded with Clarkson to provide them with more guns. I liked the sound of the drums. I liked the way they sang over St. G
eorge's Bay and vibrated within my very body. They made me feel closer to home. Go find your village, they seemed to be telling me, go see your people.
Nestled on the slopes between sandy shores and inland mountains, our new community of Freetown was exactly where most of the Nova Scotians wanted to stay. It was the only place they felt safe, and the only place they felt they could prosper. For me, however, Freetown was only a bridge. As I traded with the Temne and learned their language, I dreamed only of my first home. And I planned my overland journey, walking three revolutions of the moon to reach my native village.
A YOUNG TEMNE WOMAN NAMED FATIMA traded with me several times a week, but each time, she made me work her down to an acceptable price. She would always insist on three yards of cloth for twenty-five oranges, but at the end of each negotiation, she would accept a single yard. Before we concluded the deal, we had to pass through a labyrinth of discussion. And the more Temne I mastered, the longer the detours before I could take the oranges for the cloth. One day, as part of a detour, Fatima asked me a dozen questions about my husband, my children, and how I had lost them. After answering them all truthfully, I asked Fatima the one thing I really wanted to know.
"You have strong legs, yes?"
"I do, thank God."
"And you can walk great distances, yes?"
"I can, thank God."
"Then tell me how to find my way inland, going toward the river Joliba."
Fatima started picking up her oranges and stacking them on her platter. "That is our secret."
"Why?" I asked.
Now she lifted the platter up on her head. "We must not let you into our lands."
"Me?"
"Any of the toubabu from the ships."
"You call me a toubab? Did you not hear my story about my husband and my children? I am born in this land."
"That is a story, and a very good one. And I will tell you a story too, if you want one. But you are not asking for a story now. You are asking about my land."
"I am asking about my land. The land where I was born."
"You have the face of someone born in this land, but you come with the toubabu. You are a toubab with a black face."
"I was born in the village of Bayo, to Mamadu Diallo the jeweller and Sira Kulibali the midwife. I would still be there, but I was stolen away."
Fatima turned away from me. "One yard for the oranges, please. Story time is over."
For days afterwards, I felt a loneliness that I remembered from my earliest time in the Colonies. I was now standing on the continent of my birth, but as lost as I had been across the ocean. In the end, I decided that Fatima's rejection didn't matter. I knew who I was, and where I was from. The fact that the Temne wouldn't accept my story didn't change a thing about my life. It just meant that I was going to have to go elsewhere for information. I thought again of the lines by Jonathan Swift:
So geographers, in Afric-maps, With savage-pictures fill their gaps; And o'er unhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns.
It was true that map-makers placed elephants for want of towns. But now I understood how hard it must have been for them to penetrate the interior of Africa.
WHEN RAIN CAME TO FREETOWN, it came down in sheets. The skies hurled water as if from puncheons. We built our houses on stakes to avoid the rivers of mud. We learned to hang valuable dry goods from the ceilings. The roof became one of the most important features of our houses. We borrowed thatch techniques from the Temne, and then, when supplies allowed, constructed wooden roofs and even painted them with tar. We cooked in front of our humble dwellings, and we learned to share, to take turns, to build little shelters above our cooking stations, and to use Temne cooks. The first rainy season began in May and lasted until September, and in that time, if your beans or cassava did not have strong roots, they had no hope of withstanding the wind and the water. When the first rainy season ended and the sun emerged again, the slaving vessels began to show up more frequently in the Sierra Leone River, and the Bance Island factory became even more active.
One day in October, while Debra and I were boiling up a pepper-pot chicken gumbo, I heard footsteps, grunts, low moans and laboured breathing. It sounded like a whole village on the move, and transported me immediately back to the last day of my childhood in Bayo. Turning, I saw thirty people yoked around the neck, mostly or entirely naked, marching in line toward the river. They were being driven by tall, dark men in flowing robes with tight caps on their heads and sticks and whips in their hands. Every woman in the coffle carried a big chunk of salt or a bulging leather bag—likely filled with rice or millet—on her head. The male slaves carried bundles for their captors. One man with vacant eyes and mouth hanging open carried a bundle of spears. If his neck had been free, perhaps he could have used the weapons. But I knew that he had likely been yoked for weeks, and that his neck was sore and blistering.
I dropped my stirring spoon straight into the cooking pot and ran to King Street before they reached it. I watched them coming, captives of all ages and sizes, and wondered how I could set them free. A girl in the coffle looked at me pleadingly. She wasn't a woman yet, but she was close to becoming one. As she came near, I could see the traces of blue dye in two vertical lines carved high up on her cheeks. Looking at me directly, she called out a few words. She had the low, hoarse voice of an old woman. I saw the flash of her teeth, and although I did not know her language, I knew what she wanted: water, food, and most of all, help getting back to her family. Around her neck sat a tight-fitting wooden ring; from it ran chains connecting her to the yokes of men before and behind her. She appeared to belong to nobody but her captors. I took the girl's hand as she crossed the road. Her skin was dry and cracked; I longed to give her water but had nothing with me but the clothes on my body. She mumbled again three words. It sounded like a prayer. Perhaps the words were food, water, help. Perhaps they were please save me. I tugged at her yoke, but it was bound fast.
"Don't give up, child," I said as gently as I could, because I wanted to give her the sound of a mother's voice. In one motion, I slipped the red scarf off my head and tied it quickly around the girl's wrist. I was going to say some other kind words to her, but in that moment a coffle driver came up from behind and shoved me to the side as if I were nothing more than a goat in his path. He stayed next to the girl as she trudged forward with the coffle, and from that point the drivers stuck close to their captives. The girl was already five, ten, fifteen steps ahead, and I could not get back to her.
I looked around for help, and saw many Nova Scotians gathering by the harbour. A Nova Scotian pushed Daddy Moses onto a cart to confront the head slave-drivers, but they marched past him. Thomas Peters ran up behind me, took my arm and pulled me as we fell in behind the coffle and walked toward the water.
"Where is Clarkson when we need him?" Peters said.
"Away on business with King Jimmy," I said.
Debra led Clarkson's second-in-command—a Company man named Neil Park—to the waterfront. We all stopped there—the thirty captives, six captors, a growing crowd of Nova Scotians and a number of armed Company men. To our dismay, we saw six large canoes with Temne oarsmen ready to row.
Daddy Moses, on his cart, was having trouble reaching the edge of the water. While he struggled, Peters' angry voice rang out.
"Free these people now," he called out to a tall African in a flowing robe who stood at the front of the coffle.
The lead coffle driver ignored Peters and began to negotiate with a coxswain in charge of the canoes. Peters, enraged at the snub, reached out to grab the coffle driver. Three coffle drivers seized Peters, and one held a knife to his neck. The girl with the lines of blue on her cheeks looked at Peters and then looked at me and at the dozens of Nova Scotians behind me. I imagined that she felt that we could save her if we truly wanted to do so.
Neil Park stepped into the fray, flanked by his Temne translator. The slave-drivers didn't speak Temne either, but communicated through an interpreter of th
eir own.
"Step back so no one gets hurt," Park said to us. Nobody moved.
Park was the king of our people, the translator said. The chief slavedriver turned, smiled, gave a slight bow, and removed a small pouch of kola nuts from inside his robes. He presented them to Park, who held them lamely in one hand.
Park kept talking and managed to get the drivers to release Peters. He ordered Peters back, but the man wouldn't move. The drivers raised knives again. Peters stepped back a few feet.
"This is not your business," a translator told Park. "The coffle drivers have paid for passage through this territory. King Jimmy himself authorized the passage."
"We do not allow slavery in Freetown," Park said.
Park was told that this was Temne territory, shared with the white man but not owned by him, and that other white men at Bance Island were expecting them.
Park dropped his hands and turned to us. "We must let them through and leave them be, and take this matter up with King Jimmy."
"We will not let them take these captives," said Peters.
Park signalled to his Company men. Five officers of the Sierra Leone Company raised their guns. "It is my order," Park said, "and I shall enforce it."
"We shall not leave, and they shall not go," said Peters.
"Step back," Park said. "You cannot save the slaves. But if you cause trouble now, you could start a war with the Temne."
"They wouldn't dare," Peters said.
"They already did," said Park.
I remembered hearing that the Temne had sacked the first settlement of blacks from London.
The lead coffle driver unyoked the first captive—a young boy of about fifteen who looked as frightened of the Nova Scotians as he was of his captors— and began to steer him into a canoe. Peters dove forward, grabbed the boy and tried to pull him back onto land. The Company men raised their muskets. Park held up his hand to prevent them from shooting. Two other traders grabbed Peters, who flung them off and grabbed the captive once more. Just when I thought that Peters might prevail, pull the first boy free and trigger a full-fledged surge from the Nova Scotians, one of the slave-traders drew a sabre from a sheath and plunged it deep into Peters' chest. He grunted, tottered, dribbling frothy blood from his mouth, and dropped to the ground. The Nova Scotians began pressing forward to the water, but Park and his men sent a volley of shots above our heads.