The Book of Negroes

  "Let us hear you speak the language of the toubabu," he said.

  I pulled out Olaudah Equiano's book, and read a passage from it.

  "'That part of Africa, known by the name of Guinea, in which the trade of slaves is carried on, extends along the coast about 3,400 miles, from Senegal to Angola, and includes a variety of kingdoms. Of these the most considerable is the kingdom of Benin . . . I was born (in this kingdom) in the year 1745. The distance . . . [to] the sea coast must be very considerable: for I had never heard of white men or Europeans, nor of the sea . . ."

  A murmur spread through the crowd. People pushed closer to me. The man held up his hand.

  "Now tell us what that means," he said.

  I told them that Equiano was an African, kidnapped and taken to the land of the toubabu, and that he had survived and recaptured his freedom and written a book about his life.

  "Did he go home to kill the people who captured and sold him?" one man asked.

  "No," I said.

  "Then what kind of man was he?"

  "A man in a difficult life, travelling many oceans and lands, with no time to kill his enemies, as they were far away. He was too busy surviving to go back and kill his enemies."

  The headman was humming, which I knew was a sign of satisfaction, and the children behind him shoved each other as they tried to get closer to me.

  I was asked where my husband and children were. It hadn't worked to tell Alassane that they were in Bayo, so this time I spoke the truth. I said that the toubabu had taken my children away, and that my husband had drowned at sea.

  "And what does this sea look like, exactly?" asked the headman.

  "Like a river that never ends."

  "And what were the names of your husband and children?"

  "Chekura, Mamadu and May," I said.

  "And what were the names of your parents in this place you call Bayo?"

  "Mamadu Diallo the jeweller and Sira Kulibali the midwife."

  The people laughed and shouted when they heard the names. At first I was taken aback, and then I realized that they were expressing their pleasure at hearing the sort of names they recognized.

  The headman had many other questions. What did I mean by the statement that not all toubabu were devils, and how could it be possible to see good in some of them?

  I replied with a question of my own: "Do you not know the human heart?"

  After an evening of conversation, I was exhausted. But I stayed to speak with a village elder named Youssouf. I told him that I wanted to go to the coast.

  "No," he said, "you must stay. You will be a good wife to me."

  "But I am an old woman."

  "But you are a brave and a wise woman, and you would bring me great respect."

  "How many wives do you have?" I asked.

  "Four," he said.

  "I can't be the fifth," I said. "I can only be the first, and the only."

  "The only? What good, strong man has only one wife?"

  "My father did. My husband did. Some toubabu do."

  "Toubabu," he spat, "are animals. They steal our men and women and children and take them off and eat them or work them to death."

  "They do work them to death, and beat them and starve them, but I have never seen them eat one," I said.

  "Stay here, among us. You will do us all honour. All the villagers nearby will come to us to hear your stories."

  I knew that Youssouf and his people had saved my life, and that without them I could never escape the slavers. But I had somewhere to go, and other things to do, so I would give them the very best of myself for the time that it took me to regain my strength. And then I would leave.

  "I will stay for one moon, if you will feed me and keep me safe from the man-stealers. I will repay you by bringing honour to your village. But I cannot marry you because there is a man waiting for me, and I must go to him."

  "Another man awaits you?" he said. "Why did you not tell me that earlier?"

  "I'm telling you now," I said, and left it at that. It was not necessary to explain that the man was not an African but a toubab, and not a husband but an abolitionist. I thought of Georgia, my protector and friend, and how she had told me years ago on St. Helena Island, "Men don't need to know everything, and sometimes it's best if they know nothing at all."

  "So what honour can you bring me without becoming my wife?" Youssouf asked.

  "Take care of me and let me get my strength back," I said, "and every night for one revolution of the moon, I will tell stories of all the places I have been and all that I have seen in the toubabu's land. I will tell these stories to you and any visitors that you invite to your village."

  For one revolution of the moon, I told my stories each night to people who had come from other villages, sometimes walking hours to hear me. They brought food and kola nuts as gifts, and they left thinking and talking and satisfied.

  I told my stories to people who were willing to sit half the night, listening to me and asking questions. I was asked to speak to men, alone. I was asked to speak to women and children. Sometimes I spoke to anyone who assembled, while the drums beat and the people danced and the musicians played their balafons and their stringed guitars and sang.

  I told the story of my youth, the story of my trek to Bance Island and how I had caught babies along the way. Always, with each story, I was asked for names.

  "Who was the woman who had the baby and kept walking with her to the ship?" one woman asked.

  "Her name was Sanu, and she was most gentle," I said.

  "And what was the name of her child?"

  "Aminata."

  "But that is your name."

  "So it is."

  "Did she name her after you?" I smiled, and the woman smiled, and four people called out to me to keep talking. I told the story of the ship's passage, the revolt on the ocean, the conditions on board the ships, and of Sullivan's Island. I told of growing indigo, and harvesting it, and the Negroes enslaved in America regardless of where they were born. I told about how the toubabu would rather have pieces of silver than chickens or rum. Especially popular were the descriptions of the rich white men's homes, and of their women, and of how their women carried themselves, and gave birth, and cooked. They laughed until they cried when they heard that no white man who was wealthy would do without an African cook. And they rolled on the ground in laughter when I spoke about the medicine man on the ship who had kept a bird as a pet, fed it good food and taught it to speak the language of the toubabu. I told of the wars between the white men in America, and our betrayal in Nova Scotia, and, ultimately, of our passage to Sierra Leone and my futile search for my home.

  I never managed to return home to Bayo, but for one month in a tiny village of strangers, I became the storyteller—the djeli—that I had always hoped to be.

  Eventually, I found my energy again. I walked with the women to the millet fields, and pounded the grain with a pestle. I sat with other women while they extracted indigo from plants, stirring it in large vats just as I had done in St. Helena Island. They coloured their cloth shades of blue and purple. When the time came for me to leave, I took some of the cloth as a gift and dressed myself as they were dressed. I asked how to get back to the coast, and discovered that it was not difficult to find a guide. And thus, I made one last discovery.

  It was almost impossible to get into Africa, but easy to be taken out.

  Grand djeli of the academy

  {London, 1802}

  CLOUDS DARKENED THE SKIES INCREASINGLY as we approached England, and high winds and ugly seas battered the ship and all of us in it. I lost my appetite and didn't eat for days. I felt a singular absence of courage, perhaps because I had no determination to go somewhere else. All I truly felt was that I had grown tired and old.

  I could have stayed in Freetown, where—although some Nova Scotians had taken up arms against the Company to fight for their land and the right to self-government—at least the weather was warm and where friends had offe
red to care for me. But to assist the abolitionists, I was crossing the ocean one last time. During my years in America, I had often longed to go to London—but only as a stepping-stone to Africa. Never had it occurred to me that Africa would be my pathway to London. With me on board the Sierra Leone Packet was a botanist named Hector Smithers, who brought crates of insects, reptiles and animals preserved in rum, as well as diverse living species: one caged serpent, two rats, a box full of sand and termites, an antelope, a boar and an infant leopard.

  I took to my bed for the final weeks of the voyage, but Smithers' caged creatures fared even worse. In the end, all but the termites met their Maker over the Atlantic Ocean. Smithers pressed five sailors into duty as he raced to eviscerate the animals and preserve them in giant puncheons of rum. As the botanist scrambled to save what he could for an exhibition in London, I found myself hoping that when my time came, I would be laid gently into the earth. Neither ocean waters nor rum would do for my grave.

  I HAD FORGOTTEN ABOUT THE WHITE POOR. The long years in Sierra Leone had done that to me. The whites in Freetown had been Company men and their wives, living in the best houses, drawing the best salaries, eating the tastiest provisions. But England. Oh, England. I saw a crippled man, hobbling about on rough sticks for crutches, holding his hand out for money. I saw blind men begging, and lame women with their snottynosed children at all corners. It seemed that half of all Englishmen had at least one rotting, blackened, abscessed tooth. I saw the people shivering, ill-dressed for the cold, coughing, sneezing, sputtering and dying. Men in torn clothes had to jump—sometimes into foul ditches—when horses and carriages bore down on them. Shouts, claims and counter-accusations filled my ears. The air was acrid with burning wood and rotting vegetables and meat tossed out of shop doors. There were vendors everywhere selling newspapers, tobacco, pipes, tea, snuff, wine and hard loaves of sugar.

  In Gravesend, I was met by John Clarkson and his brother Thomas. I had not seen John in eight years. The two brothers shook my hand fiercely, put me in a horse-drawn carriage and spirited me to London. I was offered rum in the carriage, and bread, and a bit of cheese, and we stopped in a coffee house for a hot drink and a look at the newspapers.

  The coffee house was thick with tobacco smoke that burned my eyes. We had coffee sweetened with honey because the owners were boycotting sugar to support the abolitionist movement. I sipped this drink in the company of men who smoked, read, and drank coffee and tea. They spoke volubly but peaceably and peered over their newspapers at me. One bald old man seemed unable to keep himself from staring, so finally, I got up from my chair and asked if I might borrow his newspaper since he wasn't looking at it.

  "What?"

  I repeated my request.

  The man let out a guffaw. "You kin read, kin ya? I'll buy ya coffee with my own wages, and one for each of the gentlemen what brung ya, if ya can read me a piece from this newspaper."

  I took the newspaper. In Sierra Leone, I had been accustomed to reading newspapers that had been printed three or six months earlier. But this one bore the current date: October 4, 1802. I flipped through the pages and came, sure enough, to an article of interest.

  "Slavery Hearings Again," the article announced. I read aloud: "'William Wilberforce is demanding that Parliament convene another committee to investigate the alleged abuses of the slave trade.'"

  I WAS LED TO THE OFFICES of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, at 18 Old Jewry Street, in a part of the city where boys were hawking newspapers, men were calling out for passersby to enter their coffee houses, and vendors were standing outside minuscule shops, prepared to hack a side off a lamb or a chunk from a block of sugar. Horses and carriages clattered by constantly. It was noisier and more active than anything I had ever seen in Shelburne or New York, and after almost ten years in Freetown, it felt like an assault on my senses. I was led into a small, tight building and up to a room where a stove burned and candles flickered. Awaiting me were twelve men, all eager to shake my hand and welcome me to England.

  How pleased they were that John Clarkson had finally prevailed in his attempts to bring me, they said. John Clarkson did not speak, but listened while older men took over. I was accustomed to seeing him in charge in Nova Scotia and in Freetown. But here in England, Clarkson sat in the shadows of his brother and the others.

  A tall man pumped my hand, introduced himself as Stanley Hastings and began to tell me all the great plans they had in store for me. "With delicacy and all meticulous care," he said, "we will interview you and write a short account of your life, including the abuses you suffered in the slave trade."

  I cleared my throat. "You will write an account of my life?"

  "It's so important that I may take on this task myself," said Hastings. He cracked his knuckles, making each one pop, and busied himself by stuffing a pipe. "We need to arrange the account just so. The slightest inaccuracy or inattention to detail could be fatal to our cause."

  I listened warily to Hastings' plans to write about my life. The man had the energy of a workhorse, but such a thick beast had no business breaking the soil of my own private garden.

  Twelve attentive white men laced their fingers together and trained their eyes on me, but their very faces began to swirl around and around. My fever had returned. Heat and chills rolled through my body like waves on the ocean. The abolitionists kept their fire burning, but their room felt cold and unwelcoming and so very distant from the warmth of my homeland. In the absence of a husband, a son or a daughter, I longed for the African sun to envelop me in its own kind of benevolence. But I found no warmth now, just the rattling of my teeth and the familiar agony stirring in my bones.

  I raised a finger, because it was all I could lift. I wanted just three things: a blanket, a glass of water, and nobody but me writing my life story. But I was unable to ask for any of them. The next thing I knew, men with big jowls, sideburns and solicitous eyes were perched over me.

  "Are you all right?" Hastings asked.

  I closed my eyes and heard the voice of John Clarkson.

  "Of course she is not," he answered. "I told you before that this meeting was premature, and I'm afraid that I must now insist. She is my guest, under my care, and she will not face this committee again until given every opportunity to recover in my home."

  I was carried down the stairs from the room at 18 Old Jewry Street, lifted into a carriage and taken to Clarkson's home on the same street. A black butler met us at the door. He caught me when my knees buckled and took me to a private room where I was given hot broth, tea, a bed and blankets. When fever brought my bone marrow to a boiling pitch, a second black servant named Betty Ann bathed me and applied wet cloths to my forehead.

  In time, I was able to stand unassisted, empty my own chamber pot and take my first meal with John Clarkson and his wife, Susannah. Afterwards, the three of us sat together, drinking tea in a cold room with blankets over our laps and legs. Outside, a few flakes of snow had fallen, and it was damp and cold and windy. I resolved that even with the wicked British climate, I should begin to stir again and get outside if I wished to stay alive a little longer.

  Despite my life of losses, the loneliness I felt in London rivalled anything I had felt before. I was too weak to write, get up, explore the streets of London or meet with the committee. But finally, as winter turned to spring and the chill fell off the London damp, I began moving about again and gained confidence that I would not yet perish.

  In the endless grey of London, I missed the colours and tastes of my homeland. I found bread and meat uninteresting and unpalatable, and I wondered how it was that people who sailed the oceans and ruled the world cared nothing for food and how to prepare it.

  Londoners ate hardly any fruit at all. I missed the bananas, limes, oranges and pineapples of Sierra Leone. I especially missed the malaguetta peppers, and found myself writing to Debra, pleading with her to send me a shipment of spices for cooking.

  I saw almost nothing of black peop
le, apart from the occasional quick conversation with Clarkson's butler and maidservant, and neither of them would stop for more than exchanges about the weather or my health. I meant to ask the butler, a short man with a shaven head who went by the name of Dante, how I might be introduced to the black people of London, but he kept slipping away from me. When I was better able to spend more time out of bed and around the house, I sought him out and found him in the Clarksons' kitchen.

  "May we have a word?" I asked.

  "Pardon me, madam, but I was just on my way out."

  "Meena," I said. "You can call me Meena."

  He cleared his throat and looked toward the door.

  "Why are you avoiding me?" I asked.

  "No desire to offend, madam."

  "But you never stop to answer my questions."

  "It's just my orders, that's all."

  "Orders?"

  "Mr. Clarkson says I'm not to speak with you."

  "Why ever not?"

  "You are to be allowed to regain your health and prepare your account for the committee, without interference."

  "What interference?"

  Dante removed his hat, rubbed a spot on it and put it back on his head.

  "The time is late, madam."

  "What interference?" I asked again.

  Dante looked once more to the door. It was just the two of us, alone in the kitchen. He spoke so quietly that I could barely hear his next words.

  "From the blacks of London."

  "How can anyone interfere with my account, if I am to write it myself?"

  "My feelings exactly, madam. But they want your story to be pure. 'Straight from Africa' was what Mr. Clarkson said. The committee men don't want Londoners saying that the blacks of London made up your story."

  "Dante, I do not wish to get you into trouble. But please, just tell me this: Are there many of us here?"

  He exhaled audibly and broke into a broad smile. "Thousands," he said.

  "In Sierra Leone, I read a book by an African who was living in London."

  "Olaudah Equiano," Dante said.

  "So you too have heard of him?"