Mile High

by Richard Condon

  The applause was deafening. The color commentator had taken over from Dr. Gelbart on his switched-over microphone to combined networks and eighteen Canadian stations. Dan stood beside his father, proud and tall at eighteen years of age, his eyes shining. Edward had stood up with slow majesty made the more majestic by more of Willie’s red pills. He felt superhumanly tall. Professor Gelbart’s quavering voice, electronically amplified, rang like the Liberty Bell in his ears. He stepped forward and bent over, genuflecting humbly on one knee so that Professor Gelbart might slip the silken sash over his doctoral robes, then he stood and faced the microphone to deliver his address (now anthologized), “Hope Is a Promise That Is Always Fulfilled, Hope Is Our Mighty Land,” that had been written for fifteen hundred dollars by a striving poet, so poetic and so American that he had once been named as Librarian of Congress.

  Edward fell apart in the tiny bedroom of the suite Willie had arranged for them to use at a village tavern some miles away from Gelbart toward New York. Before they left the commencement festivities he had had the chance to tell Dan that his father was very ill and that this must be kept secret. Willie asked Dan if he would take the train to New York alone, then meet them aboard the Aquitania, which would be sailing at eleven o’clock that night for Southampton and Cherbourg.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Your father wanted you to have a grand tour of Europe.”

  “Oh, boy!”

  “I’ll see you aboard, then? Just ask the purser where we’ll be.”

  “You bet!”

  Edward moaned in his coma and sweated profusely. Willie didn’t call a doctor. Edward had morphine poisoning and Willie had begun to administer the antidotes himself. The private ambulance would be there at seven and they would drive straight to the pier and have Edward aboard before anyone else arrived for the sailing.

  Willie pulled his chair up to the edge of the bed and looked tenderly down at Edward’s ravaged face. None of this would have happened if Eddie had listened to him and had given up that girl before the whole affair became so complicated that it might even have led to something permanent and embarrassing. But what else could he have done? Eddie might have married that girl. A nigger. He had had to frame her. What else could he have done? He was genuinely sorry it had turned out the way it had. He loved Eddie West. He had been put on earth to serve him and to save him and it didn’t matter that Eddie would never know how he felt and how forlorn and helpless it left him. He thanked God for his gift of paranoia to Eddie because it made him manipulable, rendered him content to be manipulated, and thereby saved him from his own genius. It was an inescapable fact that communism had to be fought. Eddie saw that need so much more clearly than the rest of the world and had contained that need within his paranoia. Only Willie really loved him. Only Willie really served him. Only Willie really could save him. He belonged to Willie now.

  Willie hated Dan for the rest of his life for monopolizing his father that summer. While Willie and Dan toured southern England looking for druids, smugglers and admirals of the fleet, Edward recuperated at the Bürgenstock. When they arrived at the Grand Hotel two weeks later he seemed to be his old, stalwart self again and was doing prodigies of business by transatlantic telephone.

  Edward and Dan had the first time together in their lives. It was a wonderful summer. Dan left them in September to return to enter Yale. The Bürgenstock’s season was over at the end of September, but Edward was able to persuade Herr Frey-Furst to lease the hotel to him for the winter. When spring came again and it was time to reopen the hotels in May, Edward seemed to have no intention of ever leaving. Willie had made three round trips to New York during the year. Business demands were extremely active, because the price of every possible investment in America seemed to have fallen to its permanent low, and the Horizons partners were impatient to have Edward return to the scene to begin to buy the country for them.

  But Edward was at the Bürgenstock, living with the innocence and cleanliness and love of Irene again. At her side at the Bürgenstock he was safe from the consequences of any evil he might have done—and this he felt with a certain bewilderment, because Mary Lou Mayberry’s murder was the only evil he had ever been aware that he had done. But Willie told him he was worried and even frightened to have Edward live in Europe even within the protection of Swiss neutrality. It would be too easy for the Kremlin to kidnap him from there and to fill him with various truth serums they had developed and possibly get what they would consider a “confession” from his lips. Business needs were actually becoming oppressive. The Horizons partners were desperate to have him home. Edward could ignore Horizons but he could not overlook the patent truth that Willie had stated: Soviet Russia would have direct access to him, and it was possible that he might not be proof against their drugs. But although he became more wild-eyed and reclusive, he could not make the decision to leave Irene.

  Then Willie helped him to decide. He revealed his elaborate and detailed plan to recreate the Bürgenstock in America and to take Irene back there with them.

  Edward threw himself into this miraculous opportunity. Swiss architects went to work to reduce every square foot of buildings and terrain to quarter-inch specifications. Land scouts were sent out along the eastern seaboard of the United States, in the Great Smokies, in the Ozarks, the Rockies, and the Sierras of western America to find the site that would be most likely to match the setting of the other Bürgenstock.

  Edward became totally normal again. Or at least he returned to what passes for normal on every street of every town and city and country lane of his nation.

  BOOK TWO

  Theseus and Wife

  CHAPTER ONE

  The country of the Ashanti people formed an irregular oblong upon Africa with a triangular projection southward into the lands of the Adansi. The Ashanti were a more poetic and learned people than any in the East African coastal zones. It was their teachers who wrote, “If you are a child do not deride a short man” and “Nobody coughs secretly” and “Nobody measures the depth of the water with both legs.” It was their talking drums that called out to Asase, the Spirit of the Earth, thus:

  “Earth, condolences/ Earth, condolences/ Earth and dust/ The Dependable One/ I lean upon you/ Earth, when I am about to die/ I lean upon you/ Earth, while I am alive/ I depend on you/ Earth, while I am alive/ I depend on you/ Earth that receives dead bodies/ The Creator’s drummer says/ From wherever he went/ He has roused himself/ He has roused himself.” It was the Ashanti singers, standing before the assembled instruments who sang, almost as Horace had sung his beautiful dialogue ode “Donec gratus eram tibi,” thus: First Woman Singer: “My husband likes me too much/ He is good to me/ But I cannot like him/ So I must listen to my lover.” First Man Singer: “My wife does not please me/ I tire of her now/ So I will please myself with another/Who is very handsome.” Second Woman Singer: “My lover tempts me with sweet words/ But my husband always does me good/So I must like him well/And I must be true to him.” Second Man Singer: “Girl, you surpass my wife in handsomeness/But I cannot call you wife/A wife pleases her husband only/But when I leave you you go to others.”

  Most of the Ashanti country was covered with primeval forest. Bombax trees grew to heights of over two hundred feet, ferns were abundant and throughout the forest spread the lianas, called “monkey ropes” by the Europeans, hanging in endless festoons from tree to tree, giving a weird aspect to the forest, whose tall tangle was seldom relieved by flowers—except mimosas sixty feet high—or by birds or animals.

  But the land surrounding the towns was highly cultivated. The fields yielded grain abundantly and also yams, other vegetables and fruit. In the northeast the Ashanti country was like a beautiful park—plains covered with high, coarse grass, dotted with beobabs and with wild-plum, shea-butter and dwarf date trees. There were many animals—some elephant, leopard, many antelope, many kinds of monkeys and many venomous snakes. Large and small hippopotamuses and crocodiles were in the rivers, and the g
orgeous parrots were everywhere.

  The rivers in the north were the Black Volta and the Volta, running north and crossing the eastern part of the country. At the center were the Ofin and the Prah. In the west were the Tano and Bia rivers, which emptied their waters into the Assini Lagoon. Apart from the Volta, these rivers were navigable only by canoes.

  The Ashanti came to their country in the sixteenth century, just before Queen Elizabeth I came to the English throne. They were driven south from the countries on the Niger and the Sénégal by Moslem tribes. When they obtained possession of their region of impenetrable forest they defended themselves with a valor that became part of their national character and raised them to the rank of a powerful and conquering nation. They were of the purest Negro type. Originally they had been of the same race as the Fanti, who lived nearer the coast and spoke the same language. The Fanti lived on fan, a potatolike plant. The Ashanti ate san, which was maize.

  Their government was a mixture of monarchy and military aristocracy. There were chiefs of clans and subchiefs with hereditary rights and they formed the King’s Council. The land was held in common by the tribes, which were attached to the office of the head chief. Polygamy was practiced by all who could afford it. The crown descended to the king’s brother or to the sister’s son, never to the king’s offspring, because he might have hundreds of wives, many of them in menial positions. The people were spirit worshippers who showed repugnance to the doctrines of Islam.

  The Ashanti were the noblest warriors, and in their late history they fought the British Army five times, defeating them four, but they also wove fiber cotton, and their pottery and jewels were famous across the land. The Ashanti goldsmiths made masks and headdresses of beaten gold that hung in the king’s palace at Kumasi, from which the ancient caravan routes went to the trading centers far inland.

  Osai Tutu was the great founder of Ashanti power. He built Kumasi. He subdued Denkera and the Moslem countries of Jaman and Banna. He extended his empire to the east and to the west by conquests. He was slain in 1731. His successor was Osai Apoko, followed by Osai Tutu Quamina, who desired to make communication with the white nations. When the Fanti refused to deliver fugitives on the coast, Osai Tutu invaded their country and drove them to the sea, where there was the British fort, Anamabo, the principal slave-trading station of the Gold Coast. The fort stood on a hard rock shelf five hundred yards from the low foothills. Its walls were built of crimson brick, lightly whitewashed. It had a spiral staircase and cool arcades. Kwaka Adai, the king’s messenger, though he lived to be very old, never forgot it. There was also a thriving industry around the fort devoted to the manufacture of manacles, fetters, chains and padlocks as well as branding irons.

  On his first visit with his warriors Osai Tutu destroyed the town and slaughtered eight thousand of its inhabitants. The king refused to treat for a truce except with the governor of the Cape Coast, Colonel Torrane, who came to Anamabo, where he was received with great pomp. In 1819 the British government sent a consul to Kumasi, Mr. Joseph Dupuis, who conferred with the king. A second treaty was drawn by which the British government acknowledged the sovereignty of the Ashanti over the territory of the Fanti—truly the territory controlled by the great slavers.

  The British repudiated the treaty. The Ashanti attacked again, putting ten thousand men into the field, killing the British commander, Sir Charles M’Carthy, whose skull was thereafter used as a drinking cup at Kumasi. On the day of Sir Charles’s defeat, January 21, 1824, Osai Tutu Quamina died of natural causes. His successor, Kwaka Dua I, sent his son to the commander at Anamabo to convey the news of the succession so that a council could be assembled at once at Kumasi. The son’s name was Kwaka Adai; he was called Kwaka after his father and Adai because he had been born on the first day of Great Adai, when prisoners of war and condemned criminals were sacrificed to the spirits as a sentiment of piety toward parents and other connections.

  Kwaka Adai was captured by a party of white slavers as he came out of the forested foothills. He was chained in the slave compound to be shipped aboard the Corsican Hero, Captain Hiram Shawcull owner and master.

  The going rate for young, healthy male slaves was thirty-five pounds sterling on the Gold Coast, but Kwaka Adai brought fifty pounds, not alone because he stood six feet, four inches and was of great strength and beauty but because he was an Ashanti royal messenger. Ashantis were prized and feared above all other African slaves by the owners of the American plantations, to whom they were sold in chains. Christopher Codrington, governor of the Leeward Islands, had written to the British Board of Trade: “The Ashantis are not only the best and most faithful of our slaves but are really all born heros. There has never been a rascal or coward of that nation; intrepid to the last degree, send us more like them.” Robert Burbank DuBose, the Carolinian planter, observed that “No man deserved an Ashanti that would not treat him like a friend rather than a slave,” but he warned that they had a gift for organizing slave revolts. Colonel James Nolan, owner of the enormous Solebury Plantations of Georgia (the man who wooed and won the formidable Dame Maria Van Slyke with epistolarian fervors), wrote of buying a parcel of Ibo and Ashanti boys and stated that during the breast-branding that followed, the Iboes screamed dreadfully, but the two Ashantis were only amused by the Iboan antics and came forward laughing and of their own accord, received the two searing irons on their chests without flinching, then snapped their fingers under the noses of the branders. Nolan at once informed his distant lady love that “African and European nervous systems are different. These people don’t even feel pain.”

  Kwaka Adai had never seen the ocean before. He could not understand what had happened to him. He was the king’s messenger but he had been beaten and chained. Until he was off-loaded on the other side of the Atlantic he thought it was a direct plot against his father. He was only one of twenty-six million men, women and children who had been taken into slavery in Africa for distribution in North and South America, but one of only fifteen million who survived the crossings.

  Below decks the heat was so excessive that ship’s surgeons fainted. The air was so thin that candles would not burn. Slaves were chained in rows, lying on their backs two and two together, with five feet of headroom ledge upon ledge, packed with enormous skill to yield the most cargo. Women gave birth while they were chained to corpses, and the white crews worked on the half deck with camphor bags gripped in their teeth because the stench struck at them like the beaks of vultures. While Kwaka Adai crossed, lying in his own excrement, sloshed with pails of vinegar, sixty bodies were lost to smallpox, and the survivors were dosed with rum so that they might help to put the corpses over the side. Then all forty-two survivors were dragged on deck and made to dance and sing under whips to give them exercise and to fill their lungs.

  Kwaka Adai, age sixteen, was sold for eighty pounds sterling in the wholesale market at Bridgetown, Barbados, on May 15, 1824, then transshipped in July, to be resold at Charleston, South Carolina, for one thousand six hundred dollars, a top price. The auctioneer proclaimed to the crowd of buyers, “This man is Ashanti. Ship’s master gave special papers on him. A king’s son, this boy, and you all know the value of an Ashanti boy—none better in any market.” Kwaka Adai was bought by the planter Peter Carvell and baptized with the name of Moses Ashant. He was put in a building with eleven males, coast blacks from as far north as Sénégal and south to the Guinea bight. He was set to work in the field until he learned to speak with the other slaves and his masters, then Miss Dorothy said she wanted him for her coaches.

  Moses Ashant lived to be eighty-six years old and died in Charleston in 1894, a well-to-do man in the chandler trade. His daughter Matty was born a slave. Her daughter Smitty emigrated to New York in 1918, large with her only child, Bertha. Bertha, Mayra Ashant’s mother, had never known a man in the family, and her mother had never known a man in the family, and the only man Matty Ashant ever knew in her house was old Moses Ashant, a king’s son, who cursed in wonderfu
lly clear English at all the men who managed to get into his women without ever waiting around to get into his family.

  All the Ashant girls could cook, sew, sing, read, write and understand numbers and money. They had been taught that knowledge was the way out, because what it took to move up and out, Moses had taught them all, was confidence in self, dignity for self, pride in self, until all the rest of everything had to follow. They all knew everything about Moses Ashant and where he came from and why he was strong and wise, and each daughter told her daughter. But they were all further armed for the strenuous life. They were taught to be proud and grateful that they were Ashanti, and (like the French, English, Japanese, Spanish, Filipinos and Mexicans who had immigrated long after they had) they wholly believed it.

  Walt said he wasn’t so sure she’d been very shrewd marrying into the West family, because if they had any children, people could call them Ashanti Irish.

  Her mother had explained that being black meant you had to teach yourself that you had to trust your enemies but not your friends. Whitey not only wasn’t giving anything away but he was going to yell like hell if the blacks started taking any. But if you don’t ask, you don’t get. And you got to get for yourself, because the people who got ain’t about to give. Just don’t put your trust in the friendly liberals, something they call themselves. When you’re being killed you don’t want somebody clucking over you like a hen and saying they meant to clip the coupon and send in the five-dollar contribution that could have prevented all this. Liberals, Mama said, were the people high up in the stand where the blood couldn’t get on them who were the first to turn their eyes away when the mean folks let the lions in among the Christians to entertain the liberals. The liberals are even against Muslims, Mama said, but the Muslims were the only ones who could prove Jesus was black.