Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  “Good mouth,” Barton said in his ear. “They chews on a piece o” bark.”

  With Barton murmuring at his side like some confidential assistant, full of hints and instances, he peered at the negro’s eyeballs and into the pink whorls of his ears. He prodded his chest and listened to his heart and felt the glands of his throat. He examined the surface of the body for evidence of disease but found only the whip marks and extensive contusions in the upper arms caused by his bonds; he had been bound very tightly and for considerably longer than it had taken to ferry him from shore.

  ‘Don’t forget the cock, Mr Paris,”

  Barton said. “Seat of pleasure. Lay hold his arms, Libby. They sometimes strikes out. Big ‘un, ain’t he?”’

  The man was circumcised. Paris drew the loose skin back to look at the whole crown of the penis. He was aware again of that light, continuous trembling. He spread the man’s thighs to look for venereal lues in the region of the groin. There was nothing. Straightening up, he saw the fluttering of fear or shock at the base of the negro’s throat.

  The man panted suddenly, a single deep gasp.

  His eyes were unseeing. “He is in good condition,”

  Paris said. He experienced a momentary giddiness.

  I must have got up too suddenly, he thought. There was a sweetish, musky odour in his nostrils.

  “Let’s have a look at his arse,” Barton said. “Get him down on his knees. Get his head down, Deakin, will you? And you, Calley—press him by the nape. You fool, what are you doing? I want his head touchin” the deck an’ his tail in the air. That’s right. You have got to be up to their tricks, Mr Paris. I have known these rogues of dealers to plug up slaves’ arses with corks to keep in the bloody flux long enough to sell “em.

  You wouldn’t credit what they will stoop to.”

  “I think I would,” Paris said. The examination seemed to have passed out of his hands. He looked away from the bowed form of the black man, still as stone on the deck, to the sea, the distant wildness of the surf, the wall of forest beyond. They had come from somewhere behind there, perhaps from far inland. They were forest people. It came to Paris, like so much these days, as a shaft, a missile that found him, which he would have avoided if he had been able—broken sunshine, river banks, clearings of villages, always cover somewhere near, always enclosure. And now this terrible openness of sea and sky…

  ‘We have got to make him caper,” Barton said, cheerfully. He was his usual loquacious self now, having apparently recovered from his disappointment over the rum. “Make sure he has full possession of his limbs,” he said. “Step back, Mr Paris, out of the line of the whips. Let us see the brute jump a bit. They are idle devils. Here, you beggar, like this.” He jumped up and down and kicked out sideways. “Like that, you sabee? Quashee do same-same ting me. Jump, damn you. Here, Cavana, wake him up with your whip, will you?”’

  The negro panted when he felt the lash, and seconds later cried out on a high-pitched note that sounded more of despair than pain.

  “He is givin” us a song when we wants a dance,” Libby said with a grin, turning his good eye round on his henchman Tapley.

  ‘That’s it, oopla!” Barton clapped his hands.

  The negro had begun a shuffling motion, kicking out his feet and flapping his arms. Paris, again with a sense of being impaled on his own perceptions, saw that thick tears had gathered in the man’s eyes.

  “We have one to start with, Captain,” Barton said, going up to Thurso where he sat under the awning with the king. “Prime male, ‘bout thirty years old, no pox, no flux, clean as a whistle.”

  “We’ll start with him then,” Thurso said.

  “Tell Mr Paris not to waste his time on the older woman, she’s got fallen breasts, I won’t buy her. You sabee Thurso,” he said to Yellow Henry. “We do trade mebbe five-six time.

  What for you bring me woman dugs down her belly?

  You sabee damn well I ain’t go buy dat one.”

  Yellow Henry’s smile disappeared and his face settled for some moments into lines of sullen savagery. “She one fine-fine slave,” he said. “Worth fifty bar. She cotched together with de girl. Turns out she dat girl’s mudder.”

  “What is that to me?”’ Thurso said. “She is not worth transporting. You can’t get any sort of price for a drop-breast woman. No, she goes back to shore. I’ll keep the girl, if she is sound.”

  “She sweet-sweet.” Yellow Henry belched and began to smile again. “One more drams,” he said, holding out his glass. “She sweet cunny, dat one. Look how she holding it. She not bambot ooman—nobody bin inside. Keep her han” over it like a bird fly out.” He rolled his bloodshot eyes roguishly. ‘Bird go fly in,” he said.

  The king’s bugler laughed loudly at this witticism and half raised his bugle as if to deliver a blast, then appeared to think better of it. “Whoosh!” he laughed. “Bird fly in.”

  Thurso had not smiled at the sally. “We go below now, look-see goods,” he said. “We got plenty fine-fine thing. Yes, you can take some men with you but they’ll have to wait at the door, there’s no room inside. You had better come down with us,” he said to Simmonds. “Barton stays up here with the doctor. Haines, stand by the brandy.”

  They were below a considerable time, during which Paris, with his mentor always at his side, proceeded with the examination of the slaves. The last of the five men had a hard crust on the pinnae of the ears, a concretion oddly similar to the deposit Paris had known to form on the surface of the joints in cases of gout. There was also a tumour-like swelling in the groin which had broken at the surface to excrete a gum-like substance. “Do you see that, Barton?”’ he said.

  “See how hard it is along the edges—it has made a kind of rim round the ulcer.” In the interest of this, he forgot for a moment where he was, what he was doing. “The wound is like a crater,” he said. “I have read of this somewhere.” He began a careful palpation of the arms and legs, the short and thickset negro submitting with a sort of exhausted docility. Close to the surface, quite distinct to the touch, he found a number of small, tumour-like swellings. Beneath the dark skin he could discern a reddish colouring around them.

  ‘Been eatin” dirt, ain’t you?”’ Barton looked bored. ‘They eats dirt,” he said.

  Paris took off his hat at last and felt a reviving breeze on his head. “Nothing to do with what he has eaten,” he said sharply. “This man has yaws. I have never seen a case before but I remember now to have read of it in Jacobus Bontius, in his book on diseases attending the negroes. He describes exactly this raspberry colouring of the tubercles and the hard bony edges of the ulcerations.” Paris broke off.

  His voice had begun to sound strange in his ears, at once remote and insistent, as if he were reciting in an echoing room. He looked briefly down at his hat. On a sudden violent impulse, inexplicable to himself at the time and terribly startling to the diseased negro before him, he took it by the brim and pitched it like a quoit with all the strength of his arm clear over the side, where it went skimming with a long and graceful trajectory into the sea.

  “Unfortunately,” he continued with unmoved countenance and quickened breath, “there is some confusion in Bontius’s treatise, as he uses the same word to describe the papules of yaws and those of syphilis, whereas as far as is presently known yaws is not necessarily transmitted by sexual intercourse, but by direct contact at the infectious -“

  Glancing round, he found himself an object of general scrutiny. Even the slaves had raised their eyes to follow the bird-like skim of his hat.

  Barton was looking at him with an expression of particular attention. “I would need to keep this man under observation,” Paris said.

  “Under observation?”’ the mate said. “That’s a good’un. Why’d you pitch your tile overboard, Mr Paris?”’

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t know,”

  Paris said. He met the eyes of the diseased negro.

  They were muddy and there was a so
rt of remote terror in them. “It was mine to dispose of,” he said heavily. He felt again the hot clutch of the sky.

  Barton raised his face in the peering, sniffing, jocular way he had. “Well,” he said after some moments, “whether this quashee has got pox or whatever it is, we can’t take him. We would have the whole shipload sheddin” their skins before we get sight of Kingston. An’ one of them boys is too young, not more “n nine or ten, by the look of him. The captain won’t take ‘em so young, on account of they needs extra lookin” after an’ then generally dies anyway. So that leaves the two wimmin.”

  The procedure with these was the same as for the men, except that they were made to lie down on their backs and open their legs for the more convenient inspection of the genital parts, a spectacle arousing much ribald comment from the crew, though there were those who observed it in silence and one or two who, with feelings of uneasiness they might not have recognized for compassion, contrived— though inconspicuously—not to look closely on.

  The woman was full-breasted, with high muscular haunches and slender legs. Pushed down to the deck, she yielded to the gross inspection, merely turning her head to the side and laying an arm over her eyes.

  The girl uttered some sounds of no more meaning to the men around her than the cries of gulls, and she stiffened involuntarily against the pressure of Paris’s fingers. Her arms had to be held, or she would have covered herself. This agony of resistance was brief.

  With surrender the girl’s body collapsed into inertness on the deck, though her eyes remained open and fixed as she stared directly upwards.

  ‘nice bit of flesh, this ‘un.” Barton flicked his fingers at the small nipples with casual brutality. “Hot little bitch too, I ‘spect, when she gets over this. Like all of ‘em.

  But I would rather rattle the older one. I like ‘em matoor, they knows more tricks. Not that there’ll be much joy on this voyage, not if I know anythink, not without payin” for it with the skin off your back. With Thurso it is hands off or a floggin’. Our skipper takes a moral line with wimmen slaves.”

  Before Paris could inform himself further as to this, the captain himself reappeared from below with King Henry by his side. They reseated themselves under the awning, where the king’s motley entourage once more assembled around him.

  ‘More brandy for our guests,” Thurso said briskly. Paris had not seen him before in such festive mood. “Morgan,” he shouted, “damn you, look alive, serve it out. Mr Barton, I want you by my side here. Haines, go and see to the fire. I want them branded as soon as purchased.”

  “There are three we don’t take, sir,”

  Barton said. “There is the woman and a boy who is too young and one of the men who our doctor will give you a full report of when you are more at leisure, but it looks like a case of Spanish pox to me.”

  “I want them off the ship,” Thurso said.

  “They can go back down over the side. Tut-tut, sir,” he said, turning to Yellow Henry. “You tink Thurso go buy pox man?”’

  The king was looking graver now, though squinting slightly as a result of the liquor. “You no got green baftee stuff,” he said. “I very sorry bout dat. You got blue, you got red, you no got green.” He shook his head sadly from side to side. ‘I hopin” for green,” he said.

  ‘Plenty trade for green baftees. You no got sletas, neether. Dat bad, Cap’n Thursoo.

  Plenty trade silk sleta stuff.”

  Thurso nodded. He had expected that the mulatto would start with complaints. It was always what you hadn’t got that they claimed most to want. But he had noted the scornfully cursory way Yellow Henry had glanced at the pans and kettles and the gilt-framed looking-glasses. It was these he really wanted, not bafts or chintzes. And muskets, probably—without arms they could not make forays for slaves. “For dat tall feller there, I make you bargin,” he said. “I give you fifty-five bar for dat one.”

  Yellow Henry’s broad face, liberally moistened now and resinous-looking, sagged into lines of disbelief. He pressed a large palm the colour of dark butter against his nose in an apparent attempt to flatten it further. ‘Dat prime slave an” fust clas’ charakker,” he said, when he had to some extent recovered from his surprise.

  ‘He Mandingo people. Price all long dis coast sixty-two bar for prime man slave.”

  “Come now,” Thurso said. “We both sabee dat too high. I can’t go above fifty-seven.”

  “How you make up one bar? What you go give me make up one bar?”’

  “I make you two pound gunpowder, one bar. I make you one pound fringe, one bar. I make you one ounce silver, one bar.”

  ‘An” you make dashee, put to dat?”’

  ‘I make dashee six pewter tankards with each slave.”

  “No take tankids,” Yellow Henry said sullenly. “You tankids trash, they no got handuls.” His temper seemed to be deteriorating.

  “I take dashee two bras’ ketuls,” he said. Suddenly he started forward, his eyes rolled fearfully and his hand went to the hilt of his cutlass.

  ‘Keep dat man back,” he said.

  “What the devil is it?”’ Thurso turned sharp round. “Where are your wits, Haines?”’ he said. “Keep our people back.”

  Calley, either curious to see more closely what was taking place or in eagerness to get within touching distance of the women, had blundered too near.

  “Stand clear, you clod-poll,” Haines snarled. Annoyed at being found wanting, he struck back-handed at Calley, catching him across the cheek. “Do you want to start them shooting?”’ he said.

  Paris, leaning back against the gunwale, taking deep breaths of air, observed the bemused and rather frightened expression on Calley’s face as if from a great distance. He felt remote from the proceedings now, like an accidental bystander, and strangely open to the space of the world beyond the ship, swept, blown through with it. At the same time he was intensely aware of his physical being, aware of thirst, of his lungs breathing, of his hands, in which he still seemed to feel the warmth and shape of the women’s knees. In his hands too, not yet acknowledged in his heart, the throb of lust and jubilation he had felt at her abandonment…

  He ceased after a while to follow the bargaining, which was extremely complicated. To establish the value of the slave in bars, which he had thought at first to be the whole purpose of the proceedings, was in fact only the beginning. This bar, it seemed, was merely a value given to a certain quantity of goods. It could be half a gallon of brandy or a bag of shot or two dozen flints or a length of printed cotton.

  It was in order to obtain small concessions and adjustments in these values that Thurso and Yellow Henry, facing each other in their respective hats, wheedled and blustered and simulated mirth or astonishment or disgust.

  The tall negro whom Paris had examined first was purchased finally for six brass kettles, two cabers of cowries, four silver-laced cocked hats, twenty-five looking-glasses and an anker of brandy, with a bonus of six folding knives and a plumed hat offered by Thurso for the goodwill of the king’s trade. As soon as the deal was struck and the goods brought up, the man was dragged forward into the waist of the ship, where the branding irons had been heating all this while in the brazier.

  Some fixity of the will kept Paris gazing after them.

  The slave was concealed from view by the men holding him down. But Paris saw the equable second mate, Simmonds, take out the bar, saw him hold it up and spit on the red-hot device at the tip, caught for a moment, against the white hull of the yawl beyond, the glowing, angular design of the brandmark—it was the letter K. Simmonds’s face wore a look of concentration, a recognition of the need for accuracy, which suddenly recalled to Paris his student days, assisting at dissections. Almost, for a moment, even now, it seemed that he might find some retreat in the memory of those days, the intent circle of students clustered round the table in the lamplight, the precise and somehow stealthy approach of the knife to the cadaver.

  Faces too, there were, in this presen
t circle, which showed signs of distress, like those novice anatomists of long ago. He saw Blair’s face, marked still from his fighting, staring down with jaws rigidly set. The tall, dishevelled fiddler had a similar fixity of expression.

  These men briefly aided Paris, abetted the illusion. But from a living man, not a drained simulacrum, the sound that came now, the single cry from below, throat-formed and pure. He saw the brief tension in the group of men holding the negro down.

  Barber, with the boy Charlie to help him, moved forward with the shackles for the legs. A smell of burned flesh hung in the air. My uncle has acquired his first slave, Paris thought. Through what seemed still the ripples of the cry he heard Yellow Henry’s voice raised in a tone more plaintive than angry: “For why you no got green baftees? For why you tankids no got handuls?”’ Bargaining had commenced over the second negro.

  “Stow dat palaver,” Thurso said, leaning back with affected carelessness. “You take dashee two brass pan?”’

  “Man here no want sospens. Dey say you sospens trash.”

  “We got muskets, made Brummagem.”

  “Muskits, haw-haw.” Yellow Henry raised a face distorted with false mirth. “We know you muskits,” he said. The men around him laughed in a whooping chorus.

  It was death of course that made the difference, Paris told himself carefully, as if reciting a lesson. You can work your will on a dead body. Those laid out for dissection had been men and women dying destitute, stolen from paupers’ graves, or criminals cut down from the gallows, with no rights whatsoever over the disposal of themselves in death. And in life? As he stood there the distinction grew blurred in his mind. Was there really so much difference?

  Glancing up, he saw Hughes high in the cross-trees of the foremast, white sea-birds wheeling beyond him. From so high above what must this business seem like? What sense could someone unacquainted with the trade have made of it? Too far away to smell the scorched flesh. A brief contortion of the face, which might have betokened laughter or even merely dazzlement. A cry thinned out to a voice of the wind. And all the while these goods steadily piling up on the quarterdeck, shining kettles and pans, cut glass beads, the jumble of vividly coloured cloths. From the perspective of the cross-trees inexplicable, unless you knew. From the office where his uncle sat even the mystery was gone from it, reduced to an entry in a ledger.