All God's Children

by Aaron Gwyn

  He was moving along at a good clip when he heard voices, and crouching behind a palm, saw a party of rough-looking men moving up this trail ahead of him. This path was out of the way; no foreigner could’ve known about it. And these men were certainly foreign; they wore tunics of exotic color and carried damascene scimitars in their hands. At their head walked a hunched, filthy man in sailcloth, leading the corsarios to his village.

  He said, “The man is very familar to me. I am thinking now that Mamá is not so foolish as mi abuela has said. I am thinking I am the foolish one.”

  But still, he didn’t panic. He kept himself hunkered behind cover and watched the party out of sight.

  “I am trying to decide if it is better to carry the bananas I have gathered, or whether to do so is not so good, and it is then I notice a very strange smell—like fruit and smoke have mixed. I do not yet know how different one man’s scent is from another, one people’s from another. My nose has no experiencia. The scents I know are Mamá and Papá, mi hermanos, mi abuela—who always smells to me of bread.”

  He was catching wind of another band of pirates coming up the trail behind him. Likely, these Berbers’ diet was a good deal richer that the fish and fruit Juan was familiar with. Up to then, I daresay his palate hadn’t known much spice at all.

  So now, he had pirates up ahead and pirates back behind. He lowered himself to the ground and lay there on his belly. He started saying a prayer his mama taught him, a Catholic prayer to Mary—though perhaps there are few others in those climes. Having no real defense against the raiders but church bells to warn villagers, folks put their faith in the protection of Heaven as poor people are wont to do the world over.

  But Juan’s prayers helped about as much as mine ever have. The second band of Berbers had come up and started to pass. He watched their boots and sandals and stockinged feet trample along, footwear from all across Europe, taken in their many raids. And then a pair of bare feet stopped beside him. A deep voice spoke in an unfamiliar tongue, and though Juan hadn’t the least notion what the words meant, he knew they were addressed to him.

  He lay there with his heart fluttering in his chest, as was my own heart to hear him tell it. I looked at the faces of the men around that campfire and there was genuine fear in their features—not least of all in McClusky’s. It seemed to me I must be looking at the same expression of terror that was on Juan’s face all those years ago.

  He said: “I feel mi cuero cabelludo on fire and my hair goes very tight. There is a hand pulling me, yanking me to my feet. And here I am staring into the eye of a corsario from mi mamá’s stories. I have heard her stories since I am very small and still never believe until this moment. I had believed in Lumia more than any pirata, and I feel I have betrayed Jesucristo by trusting mi abuela’s tales.”

  “They take and set me in this boat. Maybe an hour passes. Maybe it is more. I am hoping, perhaps, the men of our village have beaten the corsarios. Then I am thinking of Mamá’s stories of being a girl on La Gomera. The men of her isle built towers on the shore to keep watch always and when a strange ship was sighted, the bells of the church would ring and the villagers would flee into the hills. I am thinking that if the men of my village are fighting or fleeing these piratas, where is the bell now? Why doesn’t it ring? Perhaps I am too far, I think. Perhaps it rings and I cannot hear and all the piratas lie bleeding in the soil already and our village is safe.

  “Then birds come bursting from the trees all around—chiffchaff, and stonechat, and the blue chaffinch that I most love to watch. They scatter up from the branches into the sky and then the corsairos come, hurrying toward the boats where we wait.

  “They are not just the two bands I have seen, but many more. Ten or eleven or maybe twelve. Hundreds of piratas. They have taken women from the village and several of the fishermen and a great number of boys: some are tied together and some stumble along with their hands bound before them and then I see that they have Father Linares as well. He is the priest who performed mi bautismo; I know him all the time I can remember.

  “Then I see the band of piratas that I first notice on the hidden trail, led by the filthy man in sailcloth. And seeing his face, I know why he is familiar to me: it is the blacksmith who mi papá said had drank and drown himself, and I feel a hatred in my heart I have never known. But still, this is not the worst.”

  Levi shook his head. “Cousin,” he said, “I hate to hear what’s worse than that.”

  Juan shrugged. “You will,” he said. “But I will tell you. The worst is that I see four corsarios come down from the trees, the last of all the piratas. They are carrying the brazen bell of our church—I have never seen it but up in its campanario—and now I know why I have not heard it ring. I do not wonder then what they could want with it, but I know if they have manage to take this bell from where it has been all my life, there is nothing these piratas cannot take, and nothing they cannot do.”

  * * *

  “I do not know how long we are at sea,” Juan told us. “It is perhaps a week. Perhaps it is longer. Pressed together in the dark, you cannot always tell. The others cried out to God, but I did not. I knew I had betrayed Him, so how could I call on him like this? In my heart, I asked His forgiveness, but I knew, having listened too long to mi abuela’s stories, I had committed a very great sin. What may redeem such betrayal? I suffered this in my soul, but I could not give it voice.”

  They put in at Algiers one morning, the port of Algiers. Juan said to feel the ship stop moving was a kind of pleasure. To rest without motion. And then, led up onto the docks, he felt the sun on his face and began to weep. He’d never considered the great comfort of sunlight, the blessing of it.

  Sad to say, these fine feelings did not last. He and the other captives were herded down a street where all the citizens of Algiers had turned out to greet them. Or so it seemed to him at the time. Juan had never seen such a crowd. Their Berber captors paraded them into the heart of the city and every street was lined with men and women, young and old alike. They threw refuse and rotten vegetables at the prisoners. Juan said that a boy of maybe five came toddling up to him only to spit in his face.

  “They are shouting all manner of insult,” he said. “One word in particular I hear over and over: kalb. This is ‘dog’ in their speech. Not even knowing the word, I am soon feeling like one. I feel such shame with all the peoples mocking and laughing. I am ashame to be seen by them.”

  “Why were you ashamed?” Levi asked. “They’re the ones ought to’ve been ashamed for treating you so.”

  Juan puffed at his pipe. He said: “There are many more of them than us, and all of them taunting and yelling. It makes a difference how many there are.”

  Levi shook his head. “That don’t figure for me,” he said. “Begging your pardon.”

  Well, it might not’ve made much sense to Levi, but it certainly did to me. Hadn’t I tucked tail myself and run for Texas once my own defects of character were trumpeted about Butler County? Kalb indeed.

  Juan seemed to feel no need to explain himself, just continued his story, telling how they were taken to the palace of one of the city’s wealthy lords. Here, they were kept in much better quarters than he’d expected and given much better food. They weren’t whipped or given chores of any kind. In fact, they had little to do but worry and wait.

  After a few weeks of such seasoning, they were shaved, he said. Head, body, and beard.

  “Shaved?” I said. “Whyever for?”

  He puffed his pipe and for the first time in the telling of his story, I thought I saw something come into his eyes, some reflection of the misery he’d endured, like a mountain peak mirrored in a pool.

  He said, “It is to show all the world that we are bonded. We have a master now.”

  He went on to tell us how grown men he’d traveled with in the corsairs’ galley now broke down weeping as their beards were razored awa
y. It was the last thing they had of themselves, I reckon. The last thing to show that they were men.

  I looked at Juan’s hair gathered in that queue behind his head, thinking, Yes. Now I see. If the misfortunes he described had been visited upon me, I would not scissor away a single strand.

  “Then,” he said, “after all this is done, we are taken to the badestan for sale.”

  The badestan was a market similar to the ones Noah and I had seen in New Orleans, it sounded like. And once a price was decided, a man walked over to that captive and painted a number on his naked chest.

  “What for?” Levi asked.

  “It is our price,” Juan said. “The price that is decided.”

  “But you’d already been bought,” Levi said. “Why write it on you?”

  “No, no,” said Juan. “It is only our first price. “Our precio estándar. Guideline, you may say. So the pasha knows our worth.”

  The pasha represented the Sultan of Istanbul in much the same way that a priest represents the Pope in Rome.

  “We are taken to his palace and now he can have—” He paused, trying to formulate the phrase in English.

  “First pick?” I said.

  “Si,” he said. “First pick.”

  And so they were traipsed before the pasha and here he comes in, with a retinue of advisors and hangers-on, a large man in silk finery, turbaned and with a great black beard, inspecting each man and the price they’d hung on him.

  McClusky snorted. “What’d you go for, laddie?”

  “I do not know,” Juan said. “The number is here”—he touched himself in the flat space between his collarbones. “I cannot look down to see.”

  He told us the pasha was beginning to select those men he would buy for himself when the priest stepped forward.

  “Your Excellency,” the padre said, “I have come to see my religion is a false one. These many years, I have lived as an infidel. I wish to confess and embrace the true faith of Allah.”

  Well, the pasha eyed Father Linares a moment, then turned, waved one of his counselors forward, and spoke something in the man’s ear. This man nodded, bowed to the pasha, then left the hall in a great hurryment. Pasha smiled at the priest. He told the padre to come closer and when Father Linares stepped up beside him, the pasha threw his arms open and embraced the priest, who, I reckon, was a priest no longer. When Father Linares turned back around, he would not look the other captives in the eye.

  The pasha began picking those he’d purchase for the bargain price scribbled on their chests, the choicest and cheapest. He cast an eye on Juan.

  “And you,” the pasha said. “You will be mine as well.”

  Juan told us he did not know if this was good fortune or bad. “I am still angry with Father Linares. The men who are not seleccionado are taken away—I will never hear what is to become of them—and the four of us who belong now to the pasha are standing in the quiet hall: it is we, the pasha, his asistentes, and the priest.”

  It was then that counselor reappeared and with him were two turbaned men with curved daggers in their sashes—like guards, said Juan, but just not exactly.

  The pasha turned to Father Linares and asked if he was indeed in earnest about swapping out religions. The padre nodded that he was.

  “Good,” the pasha said. “This is very good. Remove your gandora.”

  “Pardon?” the priest said, but the pasha did not answer questions and he did not give orders more than once. The pasha merely whispered a word to the two guards and one stepped forward, seized the priest, and stripped his tunic off him, yanking it up and over his head.

  “Lie down,” the pasha told him.

  The priest glanced around the room. His entire head was the color of a ripe, red apple. The sweat shone on his skin like blisters. In his rush to emancipate himself, he hadn’t exactly considered what his freedom might tax him.

  “Where?” he asked the pasha, still not understanding who asked questions in the palace and who it was that answered them. The other guard came up behind him and swept him off his feet, slammed him to the stone floor. He’d begun to howl rather loudly.

  “Do not move,” the pasha told him. “It is worse if you move.”

  The larger of the two guards was holding Father Linares, pinning him down, and the other squatted, drew the dagger from the golden scabbard in his sash, and taking hold of the priest’s shrunken pizzle, began to cut away the foreskin.

  Well, McClusky didn’t like this one bit.

  “They hacked off the poor man’s bod?”

  “No,” said Juan. “The prepucio. To circumscribe him.”

  “Circumcize,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Juan. “Very much.”

  “Savages!” said McClusky.

  “Well,” I told him, “I daresay that’s rather gentle compared to what these slavers get up to on these big plantations, Felix. Cane slavers and such. They brand the poor folks like cattle.”

  McClusky shook his head. “That’s a good deal different now, Captain.”

  “Is it?” I said. “Tell me how.”

  He was so flustered he couldn’t seem to make a sentence, just sat there fuming.

  Levi spoke up. He said, “Well, most Southern men don’t have any slaves at all, Cap. Sounds to me like all these Moslems do.”

  Juan removed the pipe stem from his mouth. He said, “This is not true.”

  “They take you prisoner and you’re going to sit there speaking up for them?” McClusky said.

  “I am not speaking up,” said Juan. “I am telling you—most Musulmanes have never seen an esclavo and many who have have never owned one themself. It is only a particular kind of man.”

  “And what kind would that be?” McClusky said.

  “The rich kind,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Juan. “The very rich.”

  Levi leaned over and spat into the grass beside him. “It’s still not the same as what folks do over here,” he said. “Not even similiar.”

  “No?” said Juan.

  “Not by a long chalk,” Levi said.

  McClusky said, “And there’s a deal of difference between putting a few niggers to work picking cotton and stealing Christian men from their homes, cutting off their pizzles.”

  “Not off,” Juan reminded him. “Just the prepucio.”

  “That’s no great distinction,” Levi said.

  “I might say the same to you about the poor negroes our slavers keep,” I said. “Fact, I see no difference at all between what these Berbers once did and what the good Christians of the South continue doing. And it is not just a few, Felix. It is untold thousands. And didn’t they once have homes in their native lands before being stolen away themselves?”

  “It’s as I’ve told you,” McClusky said. “Niggers are one thing; white men are something else.”

  “They’re all God’s children,” I said.

  At this, McClusky stood, swatted the dust from the backside of his pantaloons, and strode off into the dark. “I’ll not listen to any more of this,” he mumbled.

  We sat watching him recede from the light of the campfire, then sat listening to coals snap and sizzle.

  Then Levi said, “And what about these Indians we skrimmage with?”

  “The Comanche have slaves too,” I told him.

  Levi nodded. “That’s what Captain Smithwick told us. But are Indians the same as white men?”

  “They are people,” I said, though the words felt strange in my mouth and my throat tightened up.

  “Why are we hunting them then? Tell me that, Cap.”

  “We’re paid to fight them, Levi.”

  “That’s no kind of answer,” he said.

  And I knew he was right. It wasn’t.

  CECELIA

  —TEXAS, 1837—

  She was
astonished at how she enjoyed riding, being able to sit up and see the country scroll by, a new vision from one moment to the next.

  Only problem was the thinking that it brought, the horse’s hooves striking old memories from the earth or jostling them from the soil of your brain.

  It was her mother who came to her in these thoughts, spreading through her like Victoria creeper. The memory of her grandam was very close, but she’d shut out her mother ages ago.

  The womenfolk of her family had been with the Haverfords for generations. Her grandam had tended Master Haverford when he was just a boy, working in the kitchen at the old plantation house in Randolph County. So it was with Cecelia’s mother. So it was to be with her.

  But Charles Haverford had been married ten years and Anne had yet to give him a child. You could see just how badly the mistress wanted to mother. When she took to Cecelia, no one was surprised.

  She was only four when Anne began teaching her the alphabet. She could remember sitting on the woman’s lap, turning the rich-smelling pages of the primer, logs crackling beside them in the stone fireplace, the creak of the old oak rocker. Her mistress’s finger moving down the page:

  Apple-Pie.

  Bit it.

  Cut it.

  Divided it.

  Eat it.

  Fought for it.

  Got it.

  Had it.

  It’d it.

  Joined for it.

  Kept it.

  Longed for it.

  Mourned for it.

  Nodded at it.

  Opened it.

  Peeped in it.

  Quartered it.

  Ran for it.

  Snatched it.

  Turned it.

  Used it.

  Viewed it.

  Wanted it.

  Excited it.

  You’d it.

  Zoned it.

  Her mother didn’t care for all this book learning. Neither she nor her own mother were lettered and she could already feel Cecelia growing different. She said it was their mistress’s ambition to take the girl for her own.