by James Morrow
The blade flashed in the midday sun, and the next thing Ben knew he’d executed an involuntary cartwheel and collapsed on the ground. As Ben’s wits returned to him, the owner of the oiled boots—also a Negro, smaller than his companion and dressed only in agouti-skin trousers and a red neckerchief—extended a helping hand.
“How do you know my name?” Ben asked, climbing free of the snare.
“Your name is the least thing we know about you,” the knife wielder said. “Since you drift ashore, we watch you every day.”
“We keep silent, listen carefully, learn much,” the other said. “Your little play called ‘A Sense of Proportion’ is most delightful.”
The thought that the Negroes had been spying on him for over a year set Ben’s brain to reeling once again.
“Call me Njabulo, the name my mother gave me,” the knife wielder said, “and here is my younger brother, Kanisho, though to our white master in Carolina we were Jedidiah and Oswald.”
“Do I surmise you are slaves?” Ben asked.
“We were slaves,” Kanisho said. “Today we live as free citizens in Ewuare-Village, named for our ancestors’ greatest king.”
“Village?” Ben said, flabbergasted. “You’ve got a whole village tucked away here?”
“Ruled by our Grand Oba, Ebinose-Mbemba, and his Queen, Ossalume,” Njabulo said. “Let us tell you a story, Ben Franklin.” He approached the suspended agouti and deftly broke its neck. “Six months ago, Ebinose-Mbemba and Ossalume call their councilors together and ask them what should be done about the castaways in our midst. All five vote to remove your head, and your woman’s head as well. Lucky for you, the Grand Oba and his Queen reject this verdict.”
Kanisho added, “He says there is no report of Jesus Christ ever removing anyone’s head.”
“If your rulers have elected to spare my life, why did you set a trap for me?” Ben asked.
“We ensnare you quite by accident,” Njabulo said. “The jungle conceals many such devices, laid for the slave-catchers.” With his knife he cut down the agouti, offering the limp little mound of fur to Ben. “Go ahead, sir. Take it. Dead agouti don’t bite.”
After retrieving his woven-seaweed sack and stuffing his prey inside, Ben told the fugitive slaves that he wished to thank the King and Queen betimes for their clemency. Kanisho explained that the monarchs had more important tasks to accomplish that day than accepting a white man’s gratitude. Ben said he would still like to accompany them back to Ewuare-Village, that he might exhibit himself as the harmless printer and innocuous philosopher he was. The brothers assented to this proposition, but only after Ben agreed to make the trip blindfolded.
For the next two hours Njabulo and Kanisho guided their quarry through the pungent jungle, Kanisho’s neckerchief fitted across Ben’s eyes as if he were awaiting execution by a firing squad. All during the journey—up the central ridge, over the crest, and down again—the brothers related the story of their arrival on New-Atlantis, which they called Amakye-Isle.
Born into slavery on Peedee Willows, a Carolina rice plantation, Njabulo and Kanisho had come of age hearing about a very different world, the West African kingdom of Benin, where their great-grandmothers had grown yams and kola nuts ere the Portuguese slavers arrived and sent them in chains across the sea. A Bini farmer knew many hardships, many disasters, but such travails were as milk and honey compared with the endless toil of sowing and reaping a rice crop. And yet for other Carolina chattel things were evidently even worse. If Satan’s agents came in degrees of depravity, then the master of Peedee Willows, Andrew Larkin, whose father had won the plantation from the Earl of Clarendon in a game of whist, was amongst the more enlightened of his kind, a devout Anglican who believed it his Christian duty to save whatever percentage of a soul an African Negro possessed. Thus it was that Njabulo, Kanisho, and their fellows were instructed in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and baptized into the Church of England. Though routinely whipped, regularly beaten, frequently starved, and sometimes mutilated, the Peedee Willows slaves would in all probability be spared the fires of Perdition.
After three successive failed crops, Larkin concluded that the Almighty did not intend him for a rice farmer. He sold the plantation and auctioned off the slaves, subsequently heading to Connecticut with the aim of entering the beaver-hat trade. The best bid for Larkin’s chattel came from faraway Jamaica, whose sugarcane industry required a continual supply of stout black bodies. Late in July of 1720, Njabulo, Kanisho, and ninety-six other Bini were loaded into the British carrack Sapodilla and sent south to the Caribbean.
Shortly after her passage around San Salvador, both of the Sapodilla’s compasses mysteriously ceased to function, and the next morning the carrack entered a region of stagnant air and fiendish heat. As the languorous days elapsed, the captain was forced to ration water by the teaspoon and hardtack by the ounce, with the slaves’ allotment dwindling to zero. But then, in the third week of the becalming, an unlikely Moses emerged from amongst the Bini, the nimble-witted Ebinose-Mbemba, Andrew Larkin’s former footman and librarian. Exploiting the epidemic of despair that had infected the ship’s company, Ebinose-Mbemba led the other slaves in an improvised revolt that ultimately obliged them to drown the captain, strangle the first mate, debrain the boatswain, and slit each crewman’s throat.
Washing the blood from their hands, the Bini implored their ancestors’ spirits to blow them home to West Africa, but these prayers were answered only by feeble currents and anemic breezes. After nine days adrift, the Sapodilla ran aground in the shallows surrounding an uncharted isle. Ebinose-Mbemba forthwith ordered his followers to strip the carrack of every valuable artifact: not only such obvious choices as knives, axes, muskets, nails, bulkheads, timbers, planking, rope, sailcloth, telescope, and compass, but also Thomas More’s Utopia, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the King James Bible. At Ebinose-Mbemba’s command, the Sapodilla’s gutted remains were set a-flame and reduced to ashes, so that a slave-catcher happening upon Amakye-Isle would never guess that a ship had touched bottom in these waters.
“The longer we live here, the more fortunate we feel in finding this place,” Njabulo told Ben. “Most West-Indies isles are but swatches of desert, friendly to Spanish pigs, wild onions, and little else.”
“You must approach Ewuare with the proper expectations,” Kanisho warned. “Though the Grand Oba keeps Thomas More by his bed, our village is not a perfect world.”
“But we do claim this,” Njabulo said. “You will find no chains in Ewuare.”
“Not one single lock,” Kanisho said. “Not one single link.”
j
WITHIN MINUTES FOLLOWING THE RESTORATION of his eyesight, Ben decided that, Utopia or not, Ewuare was a splendid and convivial place, at least compared to his wretched little homestead by the sea. Folded into an obscure glade at the bend of the ridge, the village boasted a defensive moat hedged by a stockade wall, its pickets poised to impale marauding slave-catchers. Passing through the gates, the brothers led Ben along a dirt plaza flanked by private dwellings, each comprising five mud-huts arranged in a semicircle. Children darted from yard to yard, kicking a wooden dodecahedron according to the rules of a Bini game that Njabulo identified as uhranwi. Felicitous fragrances rode the breeze, released by the action of cooking fires on agouti stew and grouper soup.
In the middle of the plaza, evidently occupying a place of honor, rose an object resembling an immense lump of coal, large as an equestrian statue. As Ben paused to inspect the stone—a Bini deity? a monument to the Sapodilla mutiny?—a dozen curious Ewuareans clustered around him. They did not desire a closer look at the stranger, Njabulo explained, so much as “a good view of the spectacle should the King and Queen change their minds and order you beheaded.” Njabulo then laughed uproariously, evidently to indicate he was joking, though Ben had never regarded anyone’s beheading, particularly his own, as a proper locus of levity.
“Here is why the Sapodilla becomes lost,
and your own ship as well.” Kanisho rapped his knuckles on the lustrous black stone. “She is Orishanla—the Confounder.”
“Place a magnetic compass within five miles of her, and she seizes the needle and doesn’t let go,” Njabulo said.
“’Tis belike the mightiest lodestone in the world,” Ben gasped. He caressed the mineral, so massive it bid fair to make the Earth a three-poled planet.
As the crowd dispersed, having concluded that no beheadings were in the offing, Njabulo revealed that, though the Queen was off supervising the construction of a watch-tower on the lee shore, the King was currently in residence. The brothers brought Ben to the royal palace, a hulking dome of clay and bark, featuring seashells of every hue—blue, violet, pink, crimson, white—embedded in its walls like numinous barnacles clinging to St. Brendan’s ship. The Grand Oba occupied the atrium, seated on a locally made Yorkshire chair, reading Hobbes’s Leviathan whilst his prepubescent son sharpened a cutlass on a whetstone. Njabulo spoke to Ebinose-Mbemba in the Bini language, apparently explaining that the intruder desired an audience, and despite Kanisho’s prediction the proposal proved agreeable to the King, who now jumped to his feet, entrusted Hobbes to Njabulo, and invited Ben for a stroll about the palace grounds.
“You have a handsome son,” Ebinose-Mbemba said.
“And you as well, Your Majesty,” Ben said.
“Your Majesty,” echoed Ebinose-Mbemba, amused. He was tall, lithe, and pleasingly proportioned, dressed in a crumpled tricorn hat and a blue cloth greatcoat brocaded with gold threads, both presumably salvaged from the Sapodilla. “I’ve ne’er been addressed in that manner before.”
“Are you not a king?”
“They call me a king, yes, and my wife a queen besides. But what king hath only one hundred and thirteen subjects?”
“The ratio’s normally more extreme,” Ben said, nodding.
Ebinose-Mbemba swept his muscled arm through the air, a gesture that seemed to embrace the whole of Amakye-Isle. “For the Bini, there must always be a Grand Oba. They cast me in the part, and so I play it—but I believe this sad and sorry world hath seen kings enough already. From your satire entitled ‘Crowned Heads,’ might I infer you agree?”
“Quite so.”
The Grand Oba thrust his hands into his bullion-trimmed pockets. “My master, Mr. Larkin, owned many books on government, each championing a different system of rule. I have read them all, and now I must ask myself, which philosophy is best? If I follow the prescription of Mr. More’s Utopia, I shall ban all personal possessions from Ewuare and replace them with common goods. Are you familiar with this idea?”
“I have not read Mr. More, but I know he looked askance on private property.”
“Then you may also know he allowed slavery in his earthly Paradise. Tell me your opinion of slavery, Ben Franklin.”
“My opinion?” He inhaled a mouthful of moist Caribbean air, transferring the agouti sack from his left shoulder to his right. “My fellow passengers on the Berkshire included a man who made his living exhibiting fœtal monsters in bottles,” he said at last. “Slavery, I would argue, is of a similarly freakish nature. Misshapen, rejected by God, loved only by those to whom it brings wealth.”
“A very pretty answer. Ah, but what man dares insult the lion to its face?” Ebinose-Mbemba loosed a smile that hovered disconcertingly betwixt facetiousness and menace. Removing his hat, he fanned his brow until the bright gems of sweat evaporated. “Having found in Mr. More a lamentable lapse, we now move on to Mr. Hobbes. According to his Leviathan, I must impose on my subjects the harshest despotism imaginable, for all men are selfish beasts at base, evermore needing protection from one another.”
“I am acquainted with the Hobbesian outlook,” said Ben as he and the Grand Oba began their second circuit. “The eternal war of all against all. But I do not view our human species that way.”
“Nor do I, despite the many cruelties I have witnessed in my life. And so we put Mr. Hobbes aside and turn finally to Mr. Locke. Were I to heed his Second Treatise of Civil Government, I would grant my councilors more power than I myself enjoy, for only a strong legislature can secure every citizen’s natural right to life, liberty, and property. In Locke’s society, a monarch sits upon his throne only to execute the contract a community hath made with itself.”
“I’ve always found much reasonableness in Locke.”
“And yet he, too, permits slavery, allowing victorious armies to make chattels of their prisoners. I promise you, Locke would view slavery differently had he sailed with my grandmother to the Carolinas.”
Ebinose-Mbemba restored his hat, easing it downward until the shadow of the brim obscured his face. He cleared his throat, lowered his voice, and bid Ben imagine two hundred Africans pursued like game animals by men with muskets and nets. To the Portuguese slavers it mattered little whose parent, wife, husband, or child died during the hunt—and many did die—for the slave trade enjoyed both the sanction of Scripture and the imprimatur of profit. Upon their capture Ebinose-Mbemba’s maternal grandmother and the other prisoners were chained naked to their berths aboard the brigantine San Jorge. For ten weeks they lay crushed against each other, rolling about in their own waste whilst the ocean’s frigid waters seeped into the hold, the weaker Bini inevitably perishing of fever, flux, scurvy, and distemper. Halfway to the Carolinas, the captain of the San Jorge realized that he’d failed to stock enough provisions for the remainder of the voyage. His solution, so simple, so efficient, was to bring twenty Africans on deck and hurl them bodily into the sea—chained together, of course, with the lead Bini affixed to a great stone: far be it from the captain to place unearned guineas in the purse of a passing slave-master.
“In short, I must argue that no white man hath yet imagined a government likely to benefit any race save his own,” Ebinose-Mbemba said.
A draining sensation overcame Ben, as if a demon had slit his side, affixed an air-pump, and started sucking out his vitals. “I shan’t dispute the point.”
Abruptly the African halted and stomped his left foot in the dirt. He seized Ben’s shoulder and laughed as heartily as an Englishman enjoying a Congreve comedy. “Ah-hah, Ben Franklin! Ah-hah! Ah-hah!”
“Something amuses you?”
“A marvelous idea grows in my head! Follow me! Ah-hah!”
Ebinose-Mbemba guided Ben into a thatched-roof hut shaped like one of Isaac Newton’s meat pies. A dozen clay pots lined the walls, filled to overflowing with seeds, nuts, and berries, flanking a massive sea-chest. The instant the Grand Oba drew back the lid, Ben experienced the sort of coursing thrill he normally got only from swiving and philosophizing. Top to bottom, front to back, the compartment bulged with gold coins.
“Pirate treasure,” Ebinose-Mbemba explained. “We found it whilst digging our moat. But for the absence of markets, shops, and bazaars on Amakye, our village would be awash in worldly goods.”
“These doubloons are worthless to you,” Ben said in a commiserating tone.
“Worse than worthless—a curse. You are not the first white man to visit our island, Ben Franklin, nor will you be the last.”
“You believe the pirates will return?”
“Doubtless they have marked Amakye on their chart, a reckoning they are certain to favor over their distracted compass. On noting that a Bini village hath arisen where they buried their gold, they will sell this information to the slave-catchers. Now. Hear my idea. The instant the pirates appear, you will drag the sea-chest into plain sight, thereby making an inland expedition unnecessary. And so Ewuare remains hidden, secret as a leopard’s lair!”
Exhilarated by his scheme, Ebinose-Mbemba cavorted about the treasure chest like a fop breaking in a pair of boots.
“’Tis an ingenious plan, though I must ask you a question,” Ben said. “Once I give the buccaneers their gold, what’s to keep ’em from putting me and my family to the sword?”
“Your reputation for cleverness precedes you. Before the pirates come b
ack, you will have devised a solution to this problem.”
“I’m flattered that you would trust your village’s fate to me,” Ben said, his head aching as if recently employed in a game of uhranwi.
“I have your word then? You will misdirect the buccaneers on our behalf?”
“You have my word.”
“My spies inform me you are an honorable man.”
Ben closed the sea-chest, positioning himself atop the gold like an Italian prince employing a chamber-pot wrought by Cellini, and tried to picture his Honesty grid. As far as he could recall, it contained only a fourth as many blotches as Thrift, and only a sixth the number
that marred Moderation. He told Ebinose-Mbemba that in most
matters he was as weak and sinful as any other mortal, and a bit of
a coward to boot. But he would say this for himself.
He was a man
who kept
his
j
Promises
are prime amongst
those commodities to which we
books accord an almost supernatural respect.
When Poor Richard’s Almanack implored me to present
its author’s relationship with Jennet Stearne Crompton in the most
tasteful terms imaginable (for this would be the first time the world learned of their intimacy), I did not assent immediately, for I knew that my pledge, once given, could never be broken or even slightly bent. “Naturally I intend to exercise discretion,” I assured my colleague, adding, “but I shall neither truncate the truth nor abridge the facts. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” said Poor Richard’s Almanack.
Even today, certain historians perpetuate a rumor first floated by Ben’s political enemies when, at age fifty-eight, he ran for the Pennsylvania Assembly. This falsehood asserts that William Franklin’s mother was Ben’s maidservant Barbara, that she was once a prostitute, and that upon her death two years earlier he’d buried her in an unmarked grave. I am happy to report that within my species the only creatures ever to credit this nonsense are The Bridges of Madison County and The Celestine Prophecy. Unfortunately, the Pennsylvania voters of 1764 were a gullible lot, and Ben lost the election, though his party maintained a majority and subsequently renewed his appointment as the Assembly’s agent in London.