Incomparable World

by S. I. Martin

  S. I. Martin

  * * *

  INCOMPARABLE WORLD

  With a new introduction by Bernardine Evaristo

  Contents

  Introduction

  London, 29 May 1786

  London, 29 May 1786

  London, 30 May 1786

  London, July 1783

  London, 30 May 1786

  London, 20 June 1786

  London, 20 June 1786

  London, 23 June 1786

  London, 23 June 1786

  London, 23 June 1786

  London, 28 June 1786

  London, 25 July 1786

  London, 28 July 1786

  London, 2 August 1786

  London, 17 August 1786

  Brazil, Recife, October 1786

  London, 24 December 1787

  About the Author

  S. I. Martin is a museums consultant and author, specializing in black British history and literature. He is the author of several books of historical fiction and non-fiction for teenage and adult readers, including Britain’s Slave Trade (written for Channel 4 to tie in with its documentary of the same name), Jupiter Amidships, Jupiter Williams and Incomparable World.

  I am only a lodger – and hardly that

  Ignatius Sancho

  Introduction

  Black Britain: Writing Back is a new series I’ve curated with my publisher, Hamish Hamilton, at Penguin Random House. Our ambition is to correct historic bias in British publishing and bring a wealth of lost writing back into circulation. While many of us continue to lobby for the publishing industry to become more inclusive and representative of our society, this project looks back to the past in order to resurrect texts that will help reconfigure black British literary history.

  The books included in the series are my personal choices, determined by my literary values and how I perceive the cultural context and significance of the books. The series is not to be regarded as an attempt to be definitive or to create a canon. Canons are by their very nature hierarchical and have traditionally been constructed by the prevailing white orthodoxies of academia. Black British writers rarely appear on these reading lists, are rarely taught to new generations of readers and unless they become commercial successes, their legacy very quickly disappears.

  My aim is to present a body of work illustrating a variety of preoccupations and genres that offer important and diverse black British perspectives. Good books withstand the test of time, even if they are of their time. I am very excited to introduce these books to new readers who will discover their riches.

  Incomparable World by S. I. Martin is as significant a novel now as when it was first published in 1996. It is inspired by a little-known aspect of British history – the thousands of formerly enslaved Africans who, having fought on the side of the British in the American Revolution, were offered their freedom in Britain and British territories. Up to a thousand of them settled in London and it is through the lives of three fictional characters, all formerly enslaved – Buckram, William and Georgie George – that we experience the capital city between 1783 and 1787, a period when Britain was still up to its neck in the transatlantic slave trade and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was half a century away.

  I first encountered this novel when Martin and I did a public reading together in a London library in 1997, and so I first heard him read an extract from the book before I read it myself. His rich, sonorous voice boomed out into the library, with its echoey cavernous ceiling, as he brought the teeming, grimy streets, the relentless hardship and poverty, and the desperate escapades of his larger-than-life characters into the building. Much of the novel takes place in the West End, especially in what we now call Covent Garden, and Martin resurrects the past with such a delight in visceral descriptions that as I listened, I felt that I was standing in the chaotic, malodorous and dangerous old city. For some time afterwards, as I walked around Covent Garden, one of my regular haunts, the modern world dissolved before me as I imagined the black people who had once walked its muddy, rubbish-strewn streets. Britain at that time was home to about 15,000 black people, enslaved and free, three-quarters of whom lived in the capital. I was impressed at how successfully Martin had illuminated one of the many buried black narratives of our history.

  To my knowledge, Incomparable World remains the only novel about this specific aspect of black British history. Indeed, so few novels have been written about the black presence on these shores before the twentieth century that the field is almost completely wide open for writers to colour in the empty spaces. I can name very few books covering this territory. There are the young adult novels of Catherine Johnson, David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (1999) and more recently The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins (2019), set in the nineteenth century, and my own novel, The Emperor’s Babe, which is set in Roman London, 211 AD. Our national identity is constructed as much through the past as the present, while literature, the arts, media, culture and our educational systems play a defining role in determining our knowledge and shaping our perceptions and preconceptions. We understand who we are as a people in relation to our historical roots and the stories we tell ourselves about the past. When people of colour seem to be absent from British history, we can appear to be unrooted in our home culture, and made to feel like interlopers. When Martin wrote Incomparable World back in the nineties, black British history books were even more few and far between than they are today. Edward Scobie’s Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain (1972) was an early work, as was Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). Other works include local history books. This body of work tends to be sought out by black history aficionados such as myself, and sadly remains an undiscovered area of history in the public imagination. Relatively more recently there was Gretchen Gerzina’s Black Victorians/Black Victoriana (2003); The Oxford Companion to Black British History (2007), edited by David Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones; David Olusoga’s BBC television series and corresponding book, Black and British (2016); and Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufmann (2017). There are also the numerous specialized books by Stephen Bourne including Black in the British Frame: The Black Experience in British Film and Television (2001) and Black Poppies: Britain’s Black Community and the Great War (2014). The point is that when Martin refocused eighteenth-century London through the gaze of his black characters, he was breaking new ground with a novel that challenged and upended the erroneously presented blanket whiteness of British history. This was a major achievement in our literary history.

  The novel is adventurous and exuberant in subject matter and style. It is a rollicking thriller, not without personal tragedy and pathos, about three black men whose destinies and moral compasses are determined by their struggle to survive in a culture where they are placed firmly at the bottom of the heap. Martin has delved into the archives to research a novel that pulsates with vivacity and historical detail. It comes as no surprise that he himself has been a ‘Black London’ tour guide for decades, because it feels as if he has captured the psyche of the city, as one might do after walking its streets for many years. He has also cleverly inserted famous historical figures into the novel from that era, all of them former slaves who contemporaneously lived in London, further conflating fictional reality with historical veracity. These figures who appear as characters are among the first known black British writers, legendary names such as Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography is The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), and Ottobah Cugoano, who published a tract against slavery, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787). Equally legendary is Ignatius Sancho, who appears through references to his posthumous book, L
etters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782). These original, slavery/post-slavery narratives are absolute treasures.

  S. I. Martin subsequently published two children’s novels, Jupiter Williams (2007), about a wealthy Sierra Leonean boy, Jupiter, who attends a school in Clapham in 1800, which was inspired by a real school for African boys in that location at that time, and Jupiter Amidships (2009), its sequel. He also wrote the eponymous book of the Channel 4 television series, Britain’s Slave Trade (1999).

  So, now it is time to cast your minds back to the 1700s, where troubled men in a troubled city await you. I hope you find this book a fascinating fiction and an enjoyable journey into the distant past.

  London, 29 May 1786

  Buckram stood in a puddle outside the Charioteer and listened to the shouts and laughter of several black people in the big, smoky room. The alehouse was full this evening, and through a grimy, rain-streaked window he watched his old begging mentor, Georgie George (as wigless as ever), standing in front of the fire, opening and closing his shabby frock coat every few seconds.

  There was Henry Prince, the boxer, looking fatter and dressing much better, looking prosperous in fact. Two men (one black, one white) dressed as women were leaning against the bar, screaming for drinks. The publican, Offaly Michael, was still there, bullying his staff and trying to keep order.

  He caught a glimpse of Angola Molly – a lifelong whore and at twenty-eight a grandmother – giggling eagerly into the hairy ear of some rich white sot. Business as usual, Buckram thought. He scanned the crowd more closely. William wasn’t in tonight and Neville, of course, wouldn’t be seen dead in such a place.

  It had been two years since Buckram had taken a drink in a boozing ken. He studied familiar faces jabbering wildly under powdered wigs, and all the bejewelled, ill-painted women in laundered clothes and polished, buckled shoes. Then he caught his own reflection in the green-tinged pane and flinched away, before the image of a shivering, grey-bearded black ogre with matted hair and greasy clothes could settle too solidly.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the cramped tenements of Brydges Street. They looked seedy and sagged like poorly baked loaves left in a cold, grimy oven. Even from the street he could smell the sour stench that told of generations of uncleanliness. Starving, drunken whores staggered from one tavern to another, and gangs of cadgers huddled, bickering, at the mouths of alleys and courtyards. Strangers gathered under awnings and talked about the weather. The sky rumbled fitfully, pack-dogs sniffed his heels, and Buckram felt abandoned: at the mercy of an English god.

  He thought back to the night before when, too ashamed and confused to return to his old haunts, he’d taken himself to Warren Street, to the Black Sickhouse, for a meal of maggoty biscuit smeared with maggoty marrow. His bubbling bowels kept him awake throughout the night, while all around him howling madmen expired on verminous mattresses. It was almost as bad as gaol, so he escaped before morning and the arrival of the press-gangs.

  Three black Grenadier Guardsmen approached the tavern, stepping gingerly on islands of slippery smooth mud. ‘Hey, brother!’ A tall guardsman was loosening his purse. ‘Take this!’ A handful of pennies landed at Buckram’s feet. Gurgling with gratitude, he scooped up the coins. Having no pockets, he held them in his fist. He looked in again at the irrepressible high spirits behind the window. It was too soon; he couldn’t face them in there yet. First of all he needed cheap food and some real friends.

  The cookhouse was a long wooden shed with a chain-strung counter giving onto the corner of Cross Lane and Castle Street. Trays of baked potatoes swimming in lard were displayed alongside suet pudding with lumps of fat as large as walnuts. Pea soup, hot eels and sheep’s trotters were arranged on a hotplate to one side. Buckram ordered some soup and a slice of pudding. He handed over two of his three pennies before his food was slopped onto a grimy tin plate chained to the counter. It was the best meal he’d tasted in a very long time. He ate furtively, holding the plate close to his body and checking the passers-by all the while. The elf-locked Portuguese counter-man laughed appreciatively at him. ‘Straight from the Bridewell, my friend?’

  Buckram nodded and felt himself smile through a mouthful of peas and pudding.

  He headed down King Street and across Broad Street towards the heart of his old community: St Giles. Sighing with relief and dread he entered the old rookery at Dyott Street.

  It was as if the houses here had originally been one block of stone, now eaten away by giant weevils into numberless small chambers and connecting passages. Home to London’s outcasts, this dank, unlit warren attracted a constantly changing population of escaped convicts, runaway slaves, abandoned women and men without trades. Here the homeless could sleep unmolested, their slumber interrupted only by the tidal waves of shrieks and coarse chatter from the close-packed, crumbling buildings which encircled them. The area was thronged with loiterers lounging against walls the colour of bleached soot. Families of thieves and beggars, black and white, splashed across wet wynds, going in and out of each other’s homes without ceremony. It was a place without horses and it smelled of human gong.

  Buckram walked around waist-high piles of rubbish and small fires smouldering in the middle of the street. Skeletal children played in the rutted road, making mud castles in the grey-brown water. Their hair hung in greasy sweeps, their eyes were already frozen flat with the resignation normally mistaken for maturity.

  He was aware that he was being observed, but that was to be expected in the rookery. Everyone watched everyone else. There was no privacy and anything worth hiding soon became public knowledge or public property. Not for the first time did he find reassurance in this naked fact of rookery life. Every second step he would bump up against other pedestrians similarly charging through the gloom, but these incidents passed unchallenged in a parish inhabited almost exclusively by people who are stronger and stranger than anything you’d care to know. But Buckram felt safe. His ragged clothes betrayed no jingle of money or arms, he was a threat to no one and his dark skin drew no second glances.

  He followed the chants of an African melody coming from the alley called Ivy Street where he used to live. The building loomed before him, illuminated only by the candle-light twinkling softly behind countless broken windows. The drumbeats and singing from inside the house were amplified in the small courtyard, which sloped to where a pool of sewage lay soaking. Buckram leaped over it and entered the unlocked property.

  He walked casually from room to room past doors long fallen from rusty hinges in worm-eaten posts. His eyes, accustomed to gaol-light, discerned figures shuffling about where the darkness turned from grey to black. He was being scrutinized, assessed, ignored. Brown and dirty-white faces, bearded and long-haired, followed his progress up and down the stairs. The musicians were in a top-floor garret, where they intoned incomprehensible chants to a mournful rhythm and stared blankly at a candle on the floor in the middle of the room. Without breaking the music they turned as one to look at him then refocused on the candle.

  He came eventually to the third-floor room which he’d once shared with William and Neville. It was full of strangers – he counted eleven of them, all black men from Africa, America, the Caribbean and England. Some dozed on rough mats on the floor while around them a noisy game of dominoes was being played. He didn’t recognize anybody and no one seemed to notice him, so he felt his way down the banisterless staircase and stepped back out onto Ivy Street.

  He conducted a half-hearted search of the local inns: the Hampshire Hog and the Little Dublin. They were mostly full of Irish porters and market people, a few black faces, mostly young girls, but again no one he knew. On a whim, he decided to look in at the Beggar in the Bush. It was somewhere he’d not normally visit; the place was always too lively in the wrong way, bursting with gregarious vindictiveness: as Anglo-Saxon as a food fight. When he poked his head round the door a flagonful of Stepney ale – he smelled it later on his clothes – was hurled at him. He ran.
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  In Phoenix Street he paused to watch a calf being slaughtered by the roadside. An immense wave of anxiety rocked him as he turned away from St Giles and headed towards the brighter lights of town, stepping over rough sleepers as he went. He caressed his smooth penny and looked at his muddy toes sticking out of a butchered pair of women’s shoes. After years of confinement, he was too scared to sleep in the open and too scared to stop walking. A friendless future yawned before him.

  There was nothing else to do; he’d have to return to Covent Garden and face Georgie George. Tonight.

  A tense silence descended on the crowd in the Charioteer as Buckram moved through it. Clean-shaven, well-dressed drinkers surrounded him. Rivulets of sweat trickled down his back exciting his more recent sores and welts. He knew that his odour filled the room. Shiny faces skewed with disgust, then with puzzlement, horror and pity. After so long a time in the company of arrogant, devious, white villains, Buckram had lost the memory of being in a room full of their black counterparts.

  There was a weight here, an assumed intimacy that enveloped as it separated. Accurate judgements assailed him and he was being sentenced: ex-slave from the Americas, ex-soldier dumped in London, an ex-convict, homeless, childless, my brother, bad penny come round again.

  Georgie was seated at a small side table, talking close, fast and low with the three guardsmen who’d helped Buckram earlier that night. On seeing his old student Georgie halted the conversation with a curt gesture. He motioned the men away and composed himself nervously as Buckram approached.

  ‘Well, Georgie? What news?’

  Georgie reached out slowly. His normally cheerful, cynical face dropped as he took hold of the calloused, long-nailed hand uncurling before him.