The Book of Negroes

  "Last warning," Park cried out.

  One settler aimed his own musket at the African traders. Park's men let fly a volley of shots, and the settler fell. No other settlers moved forward, but I ran to Peters, who lay by the water's edge, just a few feet from the captives, who were being loaded into canoes. I knelt beside him and put my hand on his shoulder. His brown eyes widened, as if to absorb all the life that he was about to lose.

  I kept my hand on him. "You are a good man, Thomas," I said, "and a good leader."

  Peters seemed barely able to comprehend his fate. He lifted his hand an inch and I took it. Then he stopped breathing, his fingers went limp and the light left his eyes. I kept talking to him. I wanted his spirit to hear what I told him. "You led us to freedom, Thomas Peters. You led us to Africa."

  Suddenly I became aware of the hollering and the orders. Scott Wilson, the Nova Scotian who had raised his own musket against the Temne, was lying dead just a few yards away. The others were being held back at gunpoint by Park's men. Park was urging the traders to get the captives into the canoes and away from land before things got worse. The canoes pulled away from the shore in the direction of Bance Island. The slave-traders did not look back, but the girl did.

  I waved my hand, to let the child know that someone in the world still wished her well. She raised her hand in return, my red scarf still on her wrist.

  Help from the saints

  OUR COMMUNITY WAS CAST INTO DESPAIR at the loss of Peters and Wilson. We spoke of how to honour them, and I was asked to write the epitaph for Peters' tombstone: Thomas Peters, leader of Nova Scotian settlers. Fought for freedom, and is free at last.

  When Daddy Moses began to plan a "family meeting" at which only the Nova Scotians would be welcome, Clarkson privately complained to me that we were creating a barrier between ourselves and the Englishmen.

  "But Nova Scotians can't attend Company meetings," I said.

  "Running a company is one thing, running a community quite another," Clarkson said.

  We agreed to disagree on that point. But on Clarkson's request, I did ask Daddy Moses if the Nova Scotians could first gather privately, and then invite Company officials into the meeting. Daddy Moses agreed.

  When we met in the church, speaker after speaker condemned the Company for siding with the slave-traders in Freetown. Some called for an armed rebellion, insisting that the few dozen Company men would be no match for a revolt by one thousand settlers. I didn't want the Company to condone any more visits by slavers in Freetown, but I did not believe that more violence would improve our situation. Every time I had seen men rise up, they had not prevailed and innocent people had died.

  Daddy Moses managed to conclude the private meeting without any general commitment to armed revolt. When the church doors were opened to Company officials, we were joined by Clarkson as well as Alexander Falconbridge, who was another governor of the Freetown colony. Falconbridge stood at the back of the room quietly to observe the proceedings, while Clarkson took to the pulpit.

  I felt impatient at hearing Clarkson repeat that "terrible, tragic circumstances led to the deaths of two respected Nova Scotians," but relieved when he promised that the Company would pay for their funerals and offer support to their widows.

  When Daddy Moses raised the matter of traders bringing slaves through Freetown, Clarkson could only say what he had told us before: "We will not sanction slavery in Freetown. On that point every one of the Company directors in London is united."

  Clarkson's words had the effect of making us all feel more vulnerable. I wondered how vigorously the Company would protest if slavers attacked Freetown and tried to whisk us away to Bance Island. Even if twenty Company men brought out their muskets, they would be in no position to resist waves of attacks from the Temne.

  As we left the church, Alexander Falconbridge came to speak with me. "I have heard all about you, Meena," he said, extending his hand.

  "Hello, Dr. Falconbridge," I said. I knew that Falconbridge had once worked as a surgeon on a slave ship, only to turn around later and publicly denounce the slave trade. He was a tall man, and broad about the shoulders, and big in the stomach in ways that made his breathing laboured. From his bushy eyebrows, hairs spiralled out madly. His pupils were dilated and his breath smelled of rum, but I saw kindness in his eyes.

  "I am sorry for your loss," Falconbridge said. "Peters and Wilson were good men who wanted the best for their people."

  "We wouldn't be here if it were not for Peters," I said. We were out on the street and Falconbridge was still walking with me. I stopped so as not to oblige the man to follow me all the way home.

  "John Clarkson respected him, even though they argued," he said.

  I nodded again.

  "John Clarkson is also full of admiration for you."

  "He too is a good man," I said.

  "The last decent toubab," Falconbridge said, chuckling.

  I knew that Falconbridge had spent time in Sierra Leone well before Clarkson or any of us settled here. "Lieutenant Clarkson tells me that you were once involved in the slave trade, and that you later denounced it."

  "Yes, I was. I could have been the doctor on the vessel that took you to America," he said.

  "There was but one doctor on that vessel, and I saw him die."

  "Well, the surgeons do what they can for the slaves. They are one cut above the rest." He paused for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was barely audible. "But no matter. They participate. They perpetuate the sin. I did myself. But no longer."

  I allowed as how Clarkson had told me as much.

  "You must also know that I am married, and that my wife is aboard the ship right now."

  I did know that.

  "Then you know that my intentions are honourable. Come with me aboard the King George this evening, and let us speak more."

  FALCONBRIDGE KEPT SEVERAL ROOMS on the King George. That evening, he sent his Temne cook off to make a fresh chicken stew and he offered me a glass of rum.

  "I'll take a small one," I said.

  "Small for you, not so small for me," he said, smiling.

  He sat back and exhaled, took a sip of his rum and exhaled again. "Life is short, and we must take our pleasures where we can find them."

  I nodded.

  "I don't expect to make it out of this place alive, so I'll be damned if I'll be denied the comforts of drink."

  We spoke of all the different places that the Nova Scotians had lived before arriving in Sierra Leone: Africa, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, New York, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, to name a few.

  "Englishmen are born to sail," Falconbridge said, "but few of them know of all the places you Nova Scotians have been."

  "We are travelling peoples," I said.

  In the midst of our conversation, the meal arrived. When we had finished, Falconbridge lifted his napkin from his lap, pushed back his chair and sighed.

  "Do you hate me?" he asked.

  "Should I?"

  "Might you not hate all white men indiscriminately? You would have good reason."

  I poured myself more water from the carafe. "If I spent my time hating, my emotions would have been spent long ago, and I would be nothing more than an empty cowrie shell."

  Falconbridge scratched his elbow—he was sweating profusely. I wondered where a white man bathed when he lived on a crowded ship no longer fit to sail. At least in Freetown, we Nova Scotians bathed. We set up bathhouses for men and women separately, and you would be hard pressed to find a settler who didn't bathe at least weekly. Those of us who had been born in Africa did so more often—daily, even. Sometimes, late at night when I had trouble sleeping, I would lug a bucket of water up to the woods. I would find a quiet spot under the trees and the stars, and stare up at the same drinking gourd I had admired as a child. In the cool night air I would enjoy splashing the warm water on my skin and wonder, sometimes, if anybody from Bayo had survived on the night I was stolen.

  The voice of F
alconbridge shook me from my reverie. "You would have reason for hating me. Do you believe in redemption?"

  Sometimes it amazed me how direct white people could be. "I don't know," I said. "I was born three revolutions of the moon northeast of here. In my village, we had various beliefs. My father was a Muslim, and had studied the Qur'an. Others in our village said that animals and sometimes even vegetables contained spirits. We believed in helping one another at harvest time. We worked together. Ate together. Pounded millet together. We believed that we would gather when we died, return to those ancestors who had brought us to life. But nobody spoke of redemption."

  "Redemption is invented by the sinner," he said. "I have sinned, but I have also changed. It was my job to go down into the holds, and to examine men to determine if they were breathing, or if they were not. I saw monstrous abuses. My soul died in those slave vessels."

  "I know what went on in the holds of those ships," I said.

  Falconbridge pressed his fingers against his temples. "Do you know that I could not do a single, solitary thing for those men? Put on a plaster, they would rip it off. Treat a wound, it would grow redder and run with pus, and likely as not they would die anyway. The only good thing I ever did was to fight with the captain for cleaner water, better food and more frequent cleaning of the slave quarters."

  Falconbridge and I were both survivors of the ocean crossing, but it seemed that his suffering had only grown since his time on the ship.

  "I can see that you are ill at ease," I said, as gently as I could. "Why don't you tell me more about your life those days?"

  "I got out of it," he said. "And I wrote about it."

  "You did?"

  "I am not much of a writer. Clarkson tells me you are a scribe."

  I nodded.

  "You are surely more lettered than I, and I admire that. But yes, I did write about my work as a surgeon on slave vessels, with much help from the saints over there in England."

  "The saints?"

  "The people like your John Clarkson here. There's a whole crew of them in London. Whenever they can trap an unsuspecting audience in a church, they beat on their drums of sainthood good and long."

  "They do?"

  "They tried to abolish the slave trade. Are you familiar with the word 'abolish'?"

  "End. Terminate. Be rid of. Eradicate. Is that about right?"

  "Are you quite sure you were not born in England?"

  I smiled. "Do I look like I was born in England?"

  "You're be surprised by the odd-looking ducks who have been born in my country."

  "I've been called many things," I said, "but never a duck."

  Falconbridge laughed and sipped from his rum. "I hear that you want to go home."

  I nodded, and waited for him to continue.

  "I could help you, but it would involve returning to Bance Island," he said.

  "Why?" I asked.

  "The only men around here who know their way along the inland routes are the traders who show up at Bance Island," he said. "The ones who work in the fort are decent fellows."

  I stared at him.

  "What I mean to say," Falconbridge said, "is that if you meet them directly—say, with me along to make an introduction—I can guarantee that they will treat you with civility. Shake your hand, give you a drink, laugh a little, trade food for rum, or rum for food, give you a newspaper from London."

  I sighed. I couldn't imagine voluntarily taking myself to the slave factory on Bance Island.

  "It's true that they do the work of the devil," Falconbridge said. "But one of them might put me in touch with somebody who could take you inland. And then you'd get your wish."

  After a year of trading with the Temne, I had been unable to get a single detail about how to travel to Bayo. And now it seemed that a white man might open the door for me.

  "I will think about it," I said.

  His wife, Anna Maria, came into our mess room.

  "My goodness alive, you surprised me," she said.

  "I was just readying to leave," I said.

  "My husband is a complex man," she said. "Aren't you, dear."

  "I am a complex failure," he said. With that, he slipped me the tract that he had prepared for the men in England who, he said, had tried but failed to abolish the slave trade.

  The tract was about forty pages. I looked at the cover. An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, by Alexander Falconbridge. Late Surgeon in the African Trade. London, 1788.

  "What, exactly, does 'Late Surgeon' mean?" I asked.

  "It means that I quit when I couldn't stomach the work any longer."

  "He likes you," Anna Maria said.

  "Don't start," Falconbridge said.

  "When he hands out his precious little tract, he likes you, and he wants you to like him," she said. She pointed to an open page and asked me to read.

  I took it, held it six inches from my eyes, and said I needed to have two or three candles lit. They indulged me. I brought out my blue-tinged spectacles and slid them on my face. I knew that some white people in Nova Scotia would use them privately but never if others were watching. But I was too old to worry about whether Anna Maria and her husband found me unattractive. And I couldn't read without the spectacles, anyway.

  I opened the tract and read aloud: "'It frequently happens that the Negroes, on being purchased by the Europeans, become raving mad; and many of them die in that state; particularly the women.'"

  I put the book down and told them that in my experience the men went mad more readily than the women. The men, who felt an obligation to change their situation, could go mad in the face of their own powerlessness. But the women's obligation was to help people. And there were always little ways to help, even if the situation could not be altered.

  Anna Maria opened the tract to another page and handed it back to me. I read once more: "'The diet of the Negroes, while on board, consists chiefly of horse-beans, boiled to the consistency of a pulp; of boiled yams and rice, and sometimes, of a small quantity of beef or pork . . . '"

  I closed the book. It seemed like only yesterday that I had eaten such foods to stay alive, on a ship that smelled like death itself. Captives had squatted around buckets of slop, desperate for the biscuits and peanuts I smuggled from the medicine man's cabin.

  Anna Maria squeezed my elbow. "I can see that the reading is traumatic," she said. "Leave it for another time, if you'd like. But I would like to get to know you better. Would you come for tea tomorrow?"

  ANNA MARIA FALCONBRIDGE AND I BEGAN TO VISIT. She said there was hardly anyone interesting in the Company to talk to. She sometimes invited me on board to sip rum with her, and she was the only Company person who ever came to my home.

  On one occasion, she complained about Company men who were constantly giving dashes—grandiose gifts—to King Jimmy.

  "In Africa, bringing gifts—even small ones—is a sign of respect," I said.

  "One bottle of rum, perhaps. But an entire barrel?"

  I said nothing.

  She looked me over carefully. "With your obvious literacy and experiences, you should write about your life," she said. "Others have turned out such accounts to great personal advantage. Have you heard of Olaudah Equiano? He is an African, and formerly a slave, just like you. He wrote a book about his life, and became famous. I have no idea if his account is entirely true. But no matter. His book has sold everywhere in England. There is many a white Englishmen poorer than he."

  "I have not seen his account," I said.

  Anna Maria said that she had brought along a modest personal library. "I have no one to share it with, Meena. Most of the Company men know no more of reading and literature than asses know of astronomy. I would be pleased to let you have my copy."

  Outside, Temne builders were putting a new roof on my friend Debra's house next door. I saw Anna Maria eyeing the sweat glistening on their chests, and said, "Better that they be building houses than rowing slaves."

  Anna Mari
a chuckled. "I'm for humanity and all that rot," she said, "but many people more intelligent than I have argued that the slave trade saves Africans from barbarity. Are you aware of that?"

  "The English just say that to justify their own devilry," I said.

  "What about you?" she said. "Worldly. Intelligent. Literate."

  "So the fact that I can read justifies the theft of men and women?"

  "Theft? The traders on Bance Island pay dearly for their acquisitions."

  "It is theft nonetheless."

  "But, Meena, theft begins right on this continent with the Africans, stealing and plundering each other."

  "For whom do you think they are stealing each other?"

  "Africans were dealing in slaves long before the first ones were sent to the Americas," she said.

  "We had an expression in my village. 'Beware the clever man who makes wrong look right.'"

  "I can just imagine how the Liverpool businessmen would reply to that," she said.

  "Liverpool?"

  "It's where many slave-traders run their affairs in England. They would ask if you could be debating with me or if you could have read hundreds of books, had you not first been taken as a slave. Was that not your salvation? And are you not a Christian?"

  "Not really," I said, welcome for a change of topic. "I go to church to be with my people, but I can't say that I'm a Christian."

  Anna Maria fell into an uncomfortable silence. I expected her to praise the civilizing influence of Anglicanism, but she leaned forward, touched my hand and said, "I don't believe there is a single senior Company man here, or a senior officer at Bance Island, who does not have his own African mistress. Or two. Or more."