by S. I. Martin
Julius grabbed Buckram’s hand and pumped it vigorously, stopping only when he noticed its gruesomely calloused wrist.
‘You’re looking … good,’ said Julius, registering the changes in his old acquaintance.
Buckram felt his mouth spreading to a thin grin, but his mind was empty. He knew who Julius was now.
On his arrival in this city, three years previously, he and Neville had lived for two drunken months with Julius and his sailor friends in a rack-rented, leprous lodging house down by the docks. It had been winter and they had slept on bare floorboards and damp palliasses in unfurnished rooms with ceilings the colour of old leather. Julius and his small band of friends all worked on slave ships whenever they got the chance. For them Ratcliffe was a temporary home to which they returned every six months or so. Their neighbours were mostly East Indians and black runaways.
Now and then, when one of the sailors had money, a group of them would traipse up through the city to Covent Garden, where they’d spend debauched nights and mornings with bloated whores downstairs at the Cider Cellar on Maiden Lane.
Buckram had always found Julius’s company deeply depressing. The merry sailor spoke incessantly about himself and his seafaring exploits. He always seemed to him a very aggressive person. Immune to other people’s suffering, he wielded his own joy like a cudgel.
In the past his endless boasting had been tempered amongst the dissolute and desperate communal lives down by the docks, and it amazed Buckram the extent to which drink and the fellowship of lost souls could make almost any situation endurable. But now, in the clear light of springtime, three years on, it was unsettling to see how little had altered; how far they both hadn’t come. He still let the man babble on.
‘Now, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Buckie, that’s a city for a black man. The girls they have there! … You never want to leave. They have these parties, yes? These Bangala parties, real African parties with the masks, drums and everything and everybody just lines up to receive the spirits. I was there eight months, a girl every night, all the quality assemblies. You should go there, one day … find out what life is all about.’
Julius went on to show him a lurid ring supposedly won from the owner of the largest emerald mine in Brazil. That was the place. Buckram should get over there some time. As for him, he was sailing out to the Gold Coast in two days’ time. Just in London to see some friends.
‘What are you doing here? What are you doing here? Why are you walking with us?’ Buckram realized he’d spoken.
‘Weeell, I was at James Street, in the Nag’s Head the other night. Dicing. I lost everything except these clothes and this ring. A friend told me to meet him at the Stingo. They’re giving money to black people, he said. So, here I am.’
‘It’s only sixpence.’
‘It’s still money.’ Julius twisted the ring off his little finger and pocketed it. ‘I look like a beggar now, don’t I?’
They turned right at the corner of Hyde Park to leave the city by the Edgware Road. Buildings and crowds petered out to give way to fields, common and heathland, and to the east the distant villages of Highgate and Hampstead could just be made out on the hilly horizon.
They trudged past the Chapel Street toll-gate. On both sides of the Edgware Road flocks grazed and gambolled around the dwindling houses. The occasional coach clattered past them at great speed on the dirt road, eager to avoid the highwaymen and bridle-culls rumoured to be lying in wait along the thoroughfare. The only activity this morning though were families working their allotments, solitary fishermen perched over ponds and half-asleep at their rods, and a great many children, all of whom stopped their work and play to gaze at the waves of exhausted, brown-skinned folk walking through their world.
When the ragged band sat down to rest before the final mile and a half to their goal, two old women dragging hoes approached them. Buckram let one of them feel his skin and hair. The crones walked off to a small stone house from which they re-appeared with a sack of apples and a bucket of water. The men drank and ate greedily as other villagers clustered round them to touch their flesh and joke with them.
Someone said, ‘Oooooo, innit lovely!’ and everyone turned their faces to the south-west where three paddled hot-air balloons, one turquoise, one crimson and one silver, were rising sedately into the still, cloudless sky above Hyde Park.
This was the strangest island, Buckram thought. He tracked the balloons flying over his head and away to the hills.
The country itself had a different face and feel. His native land was one of aromatic woods: white cedar, maple and pine. Here all the trees seemed stunted and scentless: the ash, the oak, the mulberry. The plant life was modest, sparse and contained, as if God had gardened with a timorous touch.
He recognized a few flowers pushing through the new spring grass: rye, dandelion, ribgrass and timothy. An old brown thoroughbred mare was watching him from a crest in the meadow, and his heart leaped as he saw it canter towards him.
He started to mumble incoherently, articulating what he believed to be the horse-tongue taught him by a wandering Iroquois rogue. But as he continued he realized his memory was failing, and instead he was half-recalling one of Neville’s biblical rants, ‘… he paweth in the valley … rejoiceth in his strength … goeth on to meet the armed man and is not affrighted … the glory of his nostrils is terrible … it sayeth amongst the trumpets, ha, ha!’
Age and ill-use had bleached the beauty from the beast. She coughed and snorted fine phlegm over Buckram’s hair. Her coat sported scruffy patches, she had protruding ribs, and a thick, yellow discharge clogged her nostrils and eyes.
Buckram twisted fistfuls of taller grass from the earth, careful to avoid the foxgloves and ragwort. He rubbed the horse with it from mane to shoulder then combed her poll and forelock with his gnarly fingers. He stroked the mare once more in the direction of her coat and offered her the last of his apple.
‘Buckram! Come, we’re away!’ Julius was calling him from the rear of the beggars’ cortège as it shambled off down the road to Lisson Grove.
‘Fare thee well, my friend,’ sighed Buckram, chucking the thoroughbred under the chin. The horse whinnied and waggled her head. ‘Fare thee well.’
He loped off to catch up with his fellow paupers, and when he looked back he saw one of the old girls who’d taken pity on them reining back the animal by her mane. It had been trying to follow him.
The woman laughed and patted the horse with surprising vigour. She hollered at Buckram, ‘Oooh, aren’t you a lucky Chimney-chops! Don’t you know? He that’s followed by a mare shall soon meet maiden sweet and fair!’
The horse neighed a final goodbye and Buckram, not quite knowing why, found himself chuckling sweetly along the worn, dusty road.
They made it into Lisson Grove just before midday. The entire hamlet was full of poor, black men speaking strange English and alien tongues. As well as African-looking people, there were a number of East Indians and South Sea Islanders. Buckram paused briefly to greet a Mohawk in his own language, before shuffling on towards the low-timbered public house where their sixpenny stipend would be issued in an hour or so.
All of them, all three hundred or more of them, smelled as badly as Buckram knew he did. The crowd was thickest towards the door of the Yorkshire Stingo. Apart from a small, nervous-looking group of Hussars surrounding the pub, there was not a single white face to be seen. Buckram had never been amongst so many anxious, agitated, black men in one spot in his life. Hungry black men were everywhere.
Suddenly he was seized by a delirious vision of this land, this London, in time to come, teeming with generation after generation of his kinfolk, freedmen, English-born and bred; transforming this wet, cold island with African worship and celebration. Imperial orphans in communication with a fractured past – his present – leading Albion’s hag-masses to a greater, more wholesome dance of life. And would they, like him, still be hovering by closed doors, waiting for scraps from the master’s tab
le? And would they, like him, still be able to rely on the kindness of curious suburban strangers? God willing, death would find him before either of those futures came to pass.
He stumbled here and there all through the crowds of his beaten people, half-dreaming and dreading, waiting for his dole.
‘Buckram!’ The shout pierced through his reverie. ‘Buckram! Ethiopian Royal! Warrior, comrade!’ It was a voice from the past, sailing over the dandruffed heads of his fellow sadblacks. A voice from America. The voice of a friend. William Supple.
Buckram swivelled wildly in the throng, trying to locate the source of happy alarm in the hubbub.
‘Over there, Buckie! Over here!’
William was standing on tiptoe in a trap driven by an utterly bewildered cabbie who had just found himself in the middle of this dark unknown chaos.
Buckram, bearded head in the air, let himself be guided by William’s gesticulating arms to the expensive transport in which his oldest, truest friend stood. The two men embraced tightly, rocking slowly with closed eyes on the step of the open carriage.
‘Man, you stink like a Billingsgate fishwife!’ William held his old comrade away from him, trancing out with disbelief at what he saw. ‘What in God’s name has happened to you … I saw George this morning … he said you were back, the old bastard … Buckram, we thought you dead, we thought … what have they done to you? Two years?!’
Oblivious to the reeking humanity lapping around him, the muttered curses of the driver, his friend’s embarrassment and the noonday sun exciting fleas under his two-year-old clothes, Buckram sobbed into the chest of the man he’d dragged from the battlefields of Carolina all those years ago, when they’d compared lashes and brandings and plotted revenge in that other world across the sea.
‘Let’s go home, Buckie. Forget this place. It’s no good for you. I’ve some money, and your old sword-pistol, remember that? I’ll get you new clothes. You could use a good bath, believe me. We’re going home. Come.’
William settled his friend into the carriage. As they rattled away he was sure he heard someone behind them shouting for Buckram. He turned in his seat. A large, jovial-looking man was bouncing up and down in the road, waving both arms at the departing vehicle.
‘Someone you know?’ William inquired.
Buckram followed his gaze. There was Julius Bambara flapping about on the edge of the crowd, trying to attract their attention. Even from a distance, Buckram could read his lips, ‘Wait! Take me with you. Buckram, wait for me! Wait for me!’
Julius’s smile faded, congealed to a snarl.
‘No, Willie,’ said Buckram. ‘Never seen him before in my life.’
It could have been anybody.
The driver whipped his way out through the milling black men towards the Edgware Road. And all the way back to the metropolis, the whole rickety ride, Buckram realized, sadly, slowly, ‘This is home: London. This is my home: London. My friends are here. My life is here, and I live in this, our home: London town.’
London, July 1783
It had been a thirsty summer for the beggars when Buckram first met Georgie George. A rumour had grown that black people could pass on fatal diseases simply by being in the vicinity of fresh, running water. As a result, water-sellers avoided them and they were stoned and chased away from stand-pipes and wells.
He had been lurking along the Strand one afternoon, anxiously scanning the throng for someone weaker to overpower, when he noticed a black man leaning against a well, laughing with a desperate-looking group of white people. He was short and he wore a frayed, navy-blue frock coat. Mischievous eyes twinkled in an otherwise incredibly innocuous face.
The well stood on a crossing in the middle of the road, and horses, standing still in the jammed, noisy traffic, nibbled at its tiny green and bumped heads over a trough. The black man at the well drew up a ladle and drank in mouth-washing gulps. He passed on the half-empty ladle. Everyone spoke with marked familiarity and accustomed ease. The frock-coated man chortled and turned away leaving his bare-chested companions with his blessings and curses. Buckram trailed him, watching his bobbing, hatless head weave off round Fountain Court and zigzag into some nameless wynd. He lost him some turnings on and stopped to locate himself. He found he was in a hilly street leading down to a timberyard on the Thames. He’d never been here before and the area seemed even more run down than St Giles. Dynasties of rats skipped freely from soft, low doorway to soft, low doorway, and at the bottom of the narrow, crooked slope he could see mudlarks and other scavengers playing on rough-hewn logs piled by the waterfront. Barges and ferries moved across the sliver of river framed by dark tenements and lines of flapping, soot-flecked laundry.
A heavily armed band of in-laws were shouting into each other’s faces. Hard sunlight baked the neighbourhood and the whole place reeked of gin.
‘Oi, blackie!’ A voice like a water wheel was directly behind him. ‘What ye looking for in Dirty Lane?’
Buckram turned, resignedly and seriously, to warn off the speaker.
He found he was facing the short black stranger. The man laughed, at first silently, then out aloud, holding his heart, clapping and hooting. Buckram’s hand flew to his sword-pistol. He started to draw the blade but the man, though miming forgiveness, was still laughing. He let the sword slide back down the scabbard. The fool stopped laughing all too quickly and watched Buckram with the wary, intelligent stare of a man from the old colonies. A stare like his own.
‘You’re following me.’
‘Eh!’
‘You’ve been stalking me from the Strand. Why?’
Buckram didn’t reply.
The in-laws, detecting a harmonious voice, had postponed their brawl and were pointing at the outlanders inside their territory.
The frock-coated man grinned at them and waved inanely. They stopped in their tracks, blinking blankly. Some made as if to wave back and some made puzzled sneers.
The black man feigned doffing a hat and bowing. A woman laughed in disbelief and all the children copied her. A hoarse voice bellowed, ‘Ballocks!’ and the families broke into a charge.
‘Let’s go,’ the stranger commanded in the long vowels of the land of their birth.
Buckram saw how Georgie let targets approach him; how he sat out his mornings on a bench in St James’s Park, then ambled along by the stables at Charing Cross, before tripping up the Strand to the Piazza. He stopped off frequently in drinking dens and chop-houses where he told tall stories and was offered in return beers and spirits.
Georgie also seemed to spend a lot of time passing messages from one set of street people to another. Jewellery and small statues were offered for his appraisal wherever he went. He carried very little money yet Buckram saw him sealing several transactions involving vast sums with nothing but a handshake.
On a number of occasions he fell in beside prosperous citizens and spoke to them as they walked, seemingly picking up from earlier conversations. He’d bid them farewell a few corners on and return to the waiting Buckram with coins of mixed metals and notes he’d been given.
‘Y’see now?’ he once declared, patting his purse. ‘What any propertied white man needs is a friend, that’s all. They’ve no one to talk to, most of them, no one at all. Don’t trust each other. Talk to themselves, poor souls. So I’m their friend. And this is mine.’ He folded a note and put it in the torn seam of his coat.
‘And this,’ he flourished a second note at Buckram’s nose, ‘this is yours if you fall in with me. I’ll wager you’ve got friends, old Carolina hands, old soldiers, good fighters, men-at-arms. We can use your sort in the “Blackbirds”.’
Buckram wanted to know more.
‘Let’s just call it our little society. You’ve probably seen us round and about St Giles. Doing work on behalf of the Black Poor, as a gentleman such as yourself might say. Join us, bring your buckos. I’ll teach you everything you’ll need to know. Everything.’
Georgie was friends with everyone. Buckram
saw how he seduced and obscured then cajoled and spoke true. His was an incomparable world, as William described it: easy and busy, borderline but safe. His passion was in having the time of his life, and nothing and no one could slight his desire.
Pickled in intrigue, yet straight as the seasons: living in London made Georgie truly free.
The road to organized crime was a sharp, sweet drop. At first Buckram and William fenced for fences. They were pimps and look-outs and couriers. Sometimes they helped with coining – they learned how to drill and load dice and all the names for the different weightings; before long they could tell a bale of bard cinque deuces from a bale of direct contraries and a bale of flat cater traes from a bale of langrets contrary to the ventage. They acquired the more arcane skills of pick-pocketry from Elder Cadgers; the wipe-snitch, the cly-fake, the kinchin-lay and how to nim a ticker. Specialists abounded: upright-men, anglers, jarkmen, clank nappers, bufe nabbers, bilkers, fraters and swaddlers and the dimber damber himself, Georgie George. It was a fairly undemanding life compared to the hand-to-mouth existence they’d led hitherto. There was no shortage of food: binges of roast meat and fish replaced the communal stews of scavenged vegetables they’d grown accustomed to. All kinds of beers and spirits flowed freely and soon became part of their daily lives. Except for Neville, they ditched their fraying uniforms and started to buy new clothes – William especially. He quickly adopted the flamboyant dress code of their new circle of friends (the Blackbirds favoured bright primary colours worn in combinations that would have clashed against white skins). The room in Ivy Street soon acquired mattresses, a cupboard and a small shelf of books for William. He gained membership of several gaming houses and he began, with little success, to apply himself to the theatrical arts.