* * *
When the kissing was over, Knaggs challenged Knox. Their mates wagered their rum allowances.
At a count of one-two-three the two men ran to the gunwale and simultaneously threw the heads far out to sea. Ama, sobbing still, her face covered with drying blood, remembered a nightmare she had had in Yendi, all that time ago. It was as if it were coming true now. Time seemed to have stopped. The heads appeared to float in the air, spinning, so that one moment they saw the face, the next the unkempt hair.
Knox was the winner: his head struck the water further from the ship; Knaggs, understandably, was in poor condition after the weeks he had spent in irons on the forecastle.
The two headless bodies were unceremoniously dumped overboard for the sharks.
Now Tomba was bound to the foremast. Williams descended to the main deck and swung the cat at his naked back. He inflicted the same punishment on Ama. Then he returned to the quarter-deck and watched as each member of the crew took a turn at lashing each of the two rebels. Only Butcher was exempt: his job was to count the lashes, making a tick in his record book for each. They took their time. Sometimes five minutes elapsed from one lash to the next. The first lash hurt Ama most. Some of the knotted ends of the whip drew blood from her back; some wrapped themselves around her and struck her naked belly and breasts. While she waited for the next she closed her eyes and tried to discipline her mind, forcing herself to concentrate on Itsho, numbing herself to all else. Then Knaggs threw a bucketful of sea water over her. She had not seen it coming and she screamed at the sting of the salt.
At every stroke, the watching slaves raised their voices in unison, sharing the agony of the victims. A moment later there came an echo from the holds, whose inhabitants could only imagine what horror was being played out above their heads.
While this beating was in progress, the long boat was swung out and the two coffins were lowered into it. It was rowed some distance out to sea. The ship's flag was lowered to half mast, Bruce blew a tuneless blast on a trumpet and one of his mates beat a monotonous boom-boom-boom on a drum. At a signal from the chief mate, in command of the long boat, Williams read from the Book of Common Prayer and Arbuthnot, a quarter mile to seaward, did the same. The Love of Liberty fired its guns in salute twenty times at half minute intervals, one blast for each year of the life of Harry Baker, the age of George Hatcher being unknown. During the homage, the long boat crew tipped each casket in turn into the water.
After the burial at sea, the time between the lashes became shorter. Ama tried to keep count. She was telling herself, fifty, fifty, fifty when Knaggs’ turn came round again. He twirled the cat around and swung high, aiming at her head. One knot tore at her left ear. A bunch struck the back of her head. The knot on the longest strand took out her right eye.
Butcher ticked his chart. Then he put it down and went to examine her.
“Captain Williams,” he called up, trying to contain his anger, “any more and I shall not be responsible for this woman’s life.”
“Surely it does not make sense,” he begged, “to destroy merchandise of such potential value?”
Williams said nothing. He just indicated with a swing of his index finger that the victims should be carried away. Then he retired to his cabin.
CHAPTER 29
“Well, Nephew, what did you think of today's show?”
The nephew put down his knife and fork.
“A little too gruesome for my taste, Uncle, if you don’t mind me saying so; but, then, I don’t carry your responsibilities.”
“Believe me, I find the gore as distasteful as you do. If I have said it once, I have said it a thousand times: the slave trade is no business for a gentleman. But you see, these blacks are capable of the utmost barbarity. It is a case of them or us. I had to frighten them, to ensure our own survival. ‘And if ye will not hearken unto me, but walk contrary unto me then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury; and I will chastise you seven times for your sins.’”
The nephew was reluctant to contradict an argument for which his uncle claimed the sanction of scripture.
“What happens next?” he asked.
“As far as the slaves are concerned, I intend to keep them penned up in their holds and on short rations for a few days, just to drive the lesson home. I shall drum this into their little brains: that their comfort, indeed their lives, are totally dependent upon my goodwill.
“Tomorrow at first light, you will see us get up the yards and topmasts, reeve the rigging and bend the sails. By mid-morning this accursed continent will be out of sight.”
“How long will it take us to Barbados?”
“Two months, three months. It’s all in the lap of the gods.”
“Uncle . . .”
“Yes?”
“May I ask you a question?”
“Of course. What is it?”
“. . . The woman . . . ”
The senior Williams’ face darkened.
“Which woman?” he asked.
“Oh, you know. The one who was whipped today. I believe she is called Pamela.”
“Well, what of her?”
“I spoke to her the other day. Just a few words, I admit, but . . . Astonishing, quite astonishing. I mean to say . . . She speaks the most excellent English. Slightly accented, of course, but grammatical. Better, I would have to say than my Irish cousin Clarissa . . . Where on earth did you find her?”
The Captain’s eyes narrowed. He wondered whether the boy was having him on. But no, his remarks seemed quite innocent.
“Would you like her?” he asked.
“Like her?”
“Yes, like her. To have and to hold, to love and to cherish, your very own chattel; to fuck or to beat according to your fancy. Your very own personal maid-servant in Barbados, your private piece of black arse, as I believe you put it.”
The younger Williams was taken aback. His late father’s brother had never used such coarse language in his presence before. He blushed. His uncle must be a mind-reader. He had indeed felt a strong physical attraction to the girl. He didn’t know what to say.
“I’ll sell her to you. I reckon I could get all of fifty pounds for her in Barbados. I know a Methodist preacher there who would snap her up at that price; use her to teach the slave children in his school. But I would let you have her for forty. Well?”
“I would need some time to think it over, Uncle.”
The Captain grunted and drained his glass. There was an uneasy silence.
“Uncle, if you’ll excuse me,” said the nephew, “ I think I’ll make a few circuits of the deck and then turn in. I’m rather tired.”
* * *
“Let me take you up on deck. The fresh air will do you good,” the doctor told her.
He had used up his stocks of ointment on her back and Tomba’s. Their wounds had healed. The scabs had come off. Their backs are a mass of scar tissue, but they have survived, he told himself. That is my job as surgeon. What more can I do? I cannot change the world.
He helped Ama up the steps to the quarter-deck. She had not spoken to him since the beating. Indeed he had not seen or heard her speak to any one at all. She seemed to have shut herself off entirely from the outside world. That was not surprising. Such a lashing as Williams had inflicted upon her was a traumatic experience of the first order. As a doctor he could manage the physical recovery; but the healing of the psychic wounds was beyond the compass of his skills. Does she know that she has lost an eye? he wondered, as he settled her under the shade of the awning.
The young girl who was her constant companion sat by her side. Butcher put his foot on the gunwale.
“That’s the Portuguese island of São Tomé or Saint Thomas as we call it,” he told her. “We are now on the equator. Do you know what the equator is? I learned in school that it is an imaginary line drawn round the earth, ‘like the belt about my middle’, my teacher told us.”
He mimicked his old teacher’s large belly, but either s
he did not understand his joke or she was just not amused by it.
“I always wondered how it was possible to draw an imaginary line,” he mused. “We are already a few hundred miles into the Atlantic Ocean. Tomorrow, so I am told, we shall sail for the Americas.”
He knelt, lifted her chin and looked her straight in the eye. She looked back, but as if she did not see him.
“Is there anything I can get you?”
Sometimes Mijn Heer would use just those same words. Ama shook her head. As she lay in the hold recovering, she had made a resolution that no word of English would ever again pass her lips; and she would not co-operate with any of the whites in any way whatsoever.
She had mixed feelings about Butcher. She knew that he was not a bad man. If it weren’t for him she might have died after the beating. But it was also true that he was white and that put him squarely in the camp of the oppressors, whether he liked it or not. She resolved her ambivalence by acknowledging his questions with a nod or a shake of her head, but without speaking. He seemed to accept this, which only served to compound her dilemma. It would be easier to maintain her resolution if the whites were uniformly cruel and insensitive.
Ama looked around. There had been a change in lifestyle on board during the period of her convalescence. The boys now spent the whole day on the quarter-deck with the women, much to the joy of Kwaku’s mother. The men were allowed up on to the main deck for several hours each day, in shifts. They had been freed of their irons which were now used only for punishment.
Williams junior, William Williams, the nephew, Bill to his friends, was a bit of a dandy. In order to maintain a proper distance from the common seamen, he paid close attention to his dress. He kept his trunk in the captain’s cabin and as soon as Williams senior made his appearance on deck in the morning Bill would nip down for a change of clothes. He spent part of his day circumnavigating the main deck. A clear path had to be kept for him along the gunwales on either side. He would examine the faces of the slaves with interest, nodding to himself as if confirming some private theory. He shared his uncle’s love of books and had the Chippy fashion a deck chair for him which he placed in a corner of the quarter-deck in the shade of the awning. In the late afternoon Butcher would join him in a game a chess. Bill seldom lost. At the end of each game he would cry out in triumph, “Check-mate,” and from this he acquired his nickname from the slaves.
“Check-mate, Check-mate,” they would call as he perambulated and he would graciously tip the peak of his hat in acknowledgement.
He never entered the holds. However he did interrogate Butcher closely on the condition of his wards. He asked particularly after the two surviving rebels, the man called Tomba and the woman known as Pamela.
When Ama re-appeared on the quarter-deck, he moved his chair to where she was sitting. He was shocked at her appearance. During his year at Anomabu he had learned to distinguish one black face from another. He rather fancied himself as a connoisseur of African beauty. This girl had been quite pretty. Now her appearance was grotesque.
He tried to engage her in conversation.
“Well, miss, I am pleased to see that you have recovered sufficiently to be coming up for fresh air again,” he said.
Surprised at being spoken to, Ama looked at him. Then she averted her eye. Now what can this one’s business be with me again? she thought wearily. These white men have given me more than enough problems. I will have nothing to do with him. She moved so that her back was turned towards him.
“Well, now, that’s not a particularly polite reply to my expression of goodwill,” said Williams junior, “but I suppose, in the circumstances . . . ”
He settled down to read his book. Ama looked out at the little town which lay between the beach and the forested hills behind. The only islands she had seen before were in rivers, in the Oti and the Daka. This one was enormous by comparison, with its own mountains, forests, rivers and towns. And all alone, isolated in the middle of the great ocean. Just as we are alone and isolated, with no one to turn to for help. While we were close to the mainland, there was still some small hope: to rebel, to drive the ship onto the shore, to escape and hide; perhaps, perhaps to return to one’s family without being captured. A slim hope, but still hope. Now there is none. Or is there some indeed? The men are now allowed out on deck and without their shackles. If they could overpower the guards and somehow run the ship aground on the island, we might all disappear into the forest and make a new life there for ourselves. She interrupted her own daydream. Ama, Ama, she told herself, haven’ you caused yourself enough trouble? There must be four hundred black men on this ship. Men! Let one of them take the lead.
Williams junior suddenly laughed out loud. Startled, Ama turned to look at him. He was slapping his thigh.
“Oh, marvellous stuff!” he exclaimed. “Marvellous stuff! Have you read it?”
He held the frontispiece and title page up for her to see. Ama looked away. It seemed an age since she had idled her time away in Mijn Heer’s apartment reading novels.
“Do you read as well as you speak?” he asked.
There was no reply. All he saw was the ugly geography of lacerations on Ama's tortured back, welts criss-crossed with weals.
“Tell you what,” he continued. “Shall I read aloud to you? I'll start again at the beginning if you like. I’ve only read a few pages so far. Shall I? No answer? Well, they say that silence means consent.”
And so he started. He read well. Ama considered moving away so that she would not hear him. But what would that achieve? She felt her good resolutions dissolving. She quickly became absorbed in the story, escaping from the harsh reality of the present into a different world. She looked out towards the island but what she saw was something else.
When he came to the end of the fourth chapter he said, “Well, I think that is enough for the present.”
She looked around and for a fleeting moment he caught her eye. She turned away quickly. This fiendish fellow has discovered a weakness in my armour, she thought. I was so immersed in the story that I completely forgot myself. Yet . . . What, after all, will I achieve by depriving myself of this small pleasure? At least it provides an hour’s escape from dwelling upon the filth and smell of the holds and the hopelessness of our predicament.
* * *
He came and read again in the afternoon. When he had been reading for an hour and his voice was beginning to show signs of hoarseness, Butcher appeared, his day’s work finished.
He observed the reader and the listener but said nothing.
“Just a few more paragraphs, Doctor. Please don’t go away,” Williams junior told him.
Ama turned and silently acknowledged the doctor’s nod.
Butcher brought two stools, sat on one and placed the board on the other. Then he poured the pieces out of a velvet bag. He shifted black and white pawns from fist to fist behind his back and held them out for the other man to make his choice. Then they arranged the pieces. It is only your own stubborn pride, Ama told herself, that dissuades you from indulgence in the small pleasures on offer. So what if the others brand you a collaborator? Haven’t you suffered enough already on this accursed ship? She shifted her position to give her a view of the game.
“So,” Williams junior asked her as he made the first move, “you are a chess player too?”
Ama said nothing and concentrated her attention on the board.
“Awuraa Ama,” a young male voice addressed her.
She turned.
“Kwaku,” she replied in Asante, “how are you?”
Butcher looked up. Kwaku bowed his head in greeting.
“I am well. My mother says to greet you. She will come herself when you are less busy.”
“Busy?” Ama asked. “What do we have to keep us busy?”
Ama noticed that he found it difficult to look at her directly. She fingered her face. It must be her missing eye. She must really look a sight. Resolutely, she redirected her thoughts.
&n
bsp; “Have you ever seen this game before?” she asked him.
“The board looks like a draughts board, only smaller,” he replied, “and the pieces are different.”
“The white men call it chess. Would you like to learn to play? Do you know oware? Of course you do. Well, if you can play oware, you can learn chess too.”
“But the white men . . . ?” Kwaku asked.
She laughed.
“Do you think they can do worse than they have done already? Now the first thing to learn is the names of the pieces. There are two armies, do you see, one black, one white.”
He looked at her to see if she was serious, but she went on, translating the name of each piece into Asante. The king was ohene and the queen ohemmaa; the bishop was okomfo and the horse oponko; the castle was aban and a pawn akoa.
Butcher looked up from time to time, pleased that his patient was talking again. He wondered what she could be telling the boy.
“Do you think the wench knows how to play chess?” Bill Williams asked him, knowing full well that she would understand.
She looked at him with contempt. She had played chess with Mijn Heer practically every evening. She was not impressed with what she had seen so far of this young man’s game, though Butcher seemed even less competent. He had just made an unnecessary sacrifice of a knight. Ama picked up the discarded piece and showed the boy the moves it was allowed to make.
“Two steps forward, one step sideways; or one step forward and two steps sideways. And it can jump over the other pieces. Have you ever seen a real horse before, Kwaku, one with four legs?”
Kwaku shook his head. Horses were rare beasts in Asante.
“My father told me that the Dagomba soldiers ride on them. My father fought in the Dagomba War,” he volunteered with pride.
The Dagomba War. The Asante, Kwaku's father amongst them, defeated the Dagomba. The victors demanded an annual delivery of slaves. So the Dagomba went hunting. And that is how I come to be here on this ship.
Ama was lost in thought. She was tempted to ask Kwaku how he and his mother came to be slaves, too. Perhaps, like Esi, they had been pawned. She decided it would not be proper: his mother might be offended.
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