Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  He was a tall, stout patriarch, light brown in colour, with a reverend poll of white hair. He greeted his visitors with dignified ease and led them through a square compound formed by low huts where women sat in the shade preparing food and small children disputed the dust with chickens.

  The house was handsome and spacious, built of timber on two storeys, with gables and a broad, open verandah. Thurso glanced at Paris as they approached it, as if to remind him that this was the property of a man who had come up from nothing. Once inside he presented the mulatto with the gifts he had brought a case of French brandy and a pair of silver-mounted pistols.

  The crew members were assigned to Tucker’s retainers and led away to be fed at the back of the house. Thurso, Paris and Simmonds were at once—though it was scarce eleven—invited to table. They had green salad from Tucker’s own garden, and bushpig stewed with paw-paws, and rice with a sauce of palm oil and pepper, all served on fine plate and accompanied by French wine. In response to compliments on the quality of this from an emboldened Simmonds, their host explained in his soft, idiosyncratic English that he had taken two dozen cases a fortnight before in part payment for slaves and ivory. Not from a French ship, but an American—a twenty-gun sloop. How a Nantucket privateer had come by fine quality French wines it was better not to ask, Tucker said, with his restrained smile. Other than this, not much news. A ruffian by the name of Yellow Henry Cook had been causing trouble and poaching on trade in the interior, but he believed that had been dealt with; Paris noted that Thurso forbore from enquiring how.

  Then there was the garden—he was growing marrows and trying out a type of European potato, and he had planted lemon trees. They must see it afterwards.

  It was not till the end of the meal, over the brandy, that the talk turned to business. It appeared that Tucker had only six slaves in his pens at present, though all were male and guaranteed prime quality.

  He was expecting more within the next two or three days. He had sent a big party upriver in charge of his eldest son. If Captain Thurso would trust him for the goods, there would soon be slaves aplenty.

  If Thurso was displeased at this he did not’ show it. Tucker was not a man to cross or ruffle in any way. He would stay the night, he said, if he could trade on his host’s hospitality so far, and leave next day. Perhaps the slaving party would return in that time. It would in any case allow his surgeon and the second mate the time for a journey further upriver to see what the English factor, Owen, had to offer.

  Paris had not known that this was intended; and it was still with a feeling of surprise, and something of resentment too, at not being informed, that he found himself some half hour later seated with Simmonds in one of his host’s canoes under a low matting roof, with two oarsmen and two domestic servants of Tucker’s for escort.

  A second canoe, intended for slaves, led the way.

  A thin haze of mist hung over the water, rendering more distant objects indistinct—the canoe in front was half hidden in it. Paris could make out the man standing at the prow, the shine of his naked shoulders as he threw himself forward on the oar, the dip and flash of the long blade; but the form of the canoe itself was lost; it was as if the negro were suspended there, to perform his regular obeisance to some deity brooding above. The sky was featureless and hot, the colour of pale brass. They passed a heron at the water’s edge, to all appearance the same grey heron, hunched and dishevelled, that he had seen in Norfolk, round the reedy borders of the Wash. But the dark yellow river swirled with less familiar things: he saw the cruising jaws of crocodiles caught in misty glitters of light.

  As the channel veered away and the sea airs were lost, the forest stood still on either side and Paris felt the sweat start from his body. At the edges, beyond the ripples of their passage, the water was darker in colour and glassy: along these motionless borders lay the pale ellipses formed by the mangrove roots with their reflections, a series of perfect ovals. So motionless was the air now, in these reaches of the river, that image and reflection were seamless, undetectable; Paris found his eyes straining to distinguish the join, watching for occasional eddies to mar the surface, betray the half that was reflection into shivers.

  These were like the tremors of fever. It seemed to Paris now that disease lay like a tangible presence there on the river, that they were proceeding through the very exhalations of plague. Fever shivered in the currents of the water, muttered among the mangrove flowers, rose and fell with the insects over the surface. His own sight seemed feverish and disordered to him, one moment listless, the next strangely intent.

  He was relieved when a turn in the river brought them to a small landing stage, where the first canoe was tied up already and their escort stood waiting with Owen beside them, a thin figure in a straw hat and crumpled cotton suit, very white in the face, who began talking with a febrile eagerness to them almost before they had stepped out on to the planks.

  “I’m glad to see you,” he said. “My people here brought me word you were on your way. Damned hot and sweltery weather, ain’t it? How is trade?

  What are you carrying? Usual stuff, is it?”’

  “We’re a good ways from slaved yet,”

  Simmonds said. “I don’t know if you remember me. Name of Jack Simmonds. I was on the crew of the Arabella four years ago; you had just settled in, sir. This is our doctor, Mr Matthew Paris.”

  ‘How de do?”’ The factor’s hand was dry and hot. “Four years is a lifetime in this trade,” he said in rapid and perfunctory tones. Paris met the gaze of soft, lustreless brown eyes, saw the white face move in what seemed an uncertain attempt at a smile.

  “I was set to make my fortune within three years or get out,” Owen said, “and here I am still beside this stinking river.”

  There was a reek of rum on his breath and his eyelids were reddish and inflamed—the more noticeably so for the pallor of his face. A refuse of palm fronds and coconut fibre littered the bank above the landing stage, with here and there the corpses of smallish, mud-coloured crabs emitting an odour of sadness and decay. The sky above had lost all colour now. For some moments the three men stood in an uncertain silence by the water, as if some other purpose had intervened, some purpose not their own, not yet fully apprehended.

  “Captain Thurso sends his compliments,”

  Paris said at last. “He is not able to come in person, he is staying with Mr Tucker.”

  At this, Owen appeared to recollect himself.

  “Tucker, there’s a man,” he said. “You had better leave someone in charge of the canoes if there is anything worth stealing in them. These people are thieves, every man of them; they have no notion of private property, none at all, not an iota.

  They will not rob you to your face but they will pilfer you to kingdom-come.

  ‘Case in point,” he continued with the same febrile eagerness as they climbed up from the mooring stage, “and it is why you find me a trifle in disarray at present. I have been surprised this very morning with finding the storehouse broke open and goods carried off to the value of fifty bars at least, that is near the value of a prime slave, in rum and tobacco and other goods, and small signs of discovering who are the thieves, except you bring in the Mandingo priest, which I have done, just to try it, not that a Christian can believe in their hocus-pocus tricks, but yet I have seen them perform strange things at different times while I have been a trader on the river here. On top of all that, just today my people have brought in three dead men from the bush. They are Bulum and one of them a chief of sorts—badly mutilated. He was a well-known character in these parts and so I am obliged to keep them here till they are fetched away by the Bulum priests. They are noisome already, but I can do no other, these people are particular when it comes to such matters.”

  The house stood on the rise before them, a low rectangle, whitewashed mud brick on a framework of poles, with a sloping thatched roof. A wooden fence made a compound round it. Within this, in the shade of the fence, two men lay asleep,
their spears beside them. A few thin hens scraped in the dust.

  “These are Susu tribesmen,” Owen said, nodding towards the sleepers. “They came down from the interior, twenty days” march from a great river, twenty times the size of this one, according to what they say —these fellows embroider everything of course. They came with a small cofHe of slaves—twelve altogether, but one was dying, she couldn’t keep on her feet. You won’t believe it but they still expected me to buy her. The reason they gave was that since they had brought her all that way she must be worth something.

  They have got no idea of commerce. Then they wanted dashes far above the usual to make up for it. They are always optimistic; they are like children.”

  His eyes were soft as a cow’s. A small nervous pulse beat in the thin hollow of his throat. Paris read in his gaze a plea to be understood, to be approved. “I wonder why it is we think children are optimistic,” he said. “I don’t believe I was very optimistic when I was a child, rather the contrary.

  Most of the future was dread.” As it is now, he thought. He was back in the dread of childhood now, with Owen’s blacks soon to examine.

  ‘Eh?”’ Owen appeared involved for some moments in some painful effort of memory. “Well, no,” he said, “perhaps you are right. All the same, do I look a man to buy a dying negro? I wasn’t born yesterday, I told them. It takes more than a naked savage to get the better of Timothy Owen. I purchased nine in the end, six men and three women. I have got them in the barracoon behind.

  Would you like to look them over now or should we go in and crack a bottle first?”’

  “We should see to the business first,” Paris said.

  “Don’t you think so, Simmonds?”’

  The mate was visibly divided. But after some seconds of pause he said, “Yes, let us get it done.”

  “The rum will still be there,” Owen said. “I am glad to see you go armed, gentlemen. I never go near a captive negro without a pistol loaded and ready and someone to cover me. We’d better have these fellows along too, I think.” He went over and kicked lightly at the sleeping men, gesturing to them when they sat up that they should follow.

  They skirted the fence and passed behind the house where an acre or so of forest had been cleared. A tethered goat raised its beard at them. A full-bodied woman in a blue cotton shift was hanging clothes on the line; she did not look towards them as they passed. The barracoon stood over against the broken edges of the forest. As they approached, a vulture which had been perched on the ridge-pole raised a wattled head to regard them, then flapped indignantly away. Through a lattice-work of rafters and rush matting Paris made out the forms of the negroes inside the barracoon.

  “I made considerable efforts to have a vegetable garden here at one time,” Owen said, with the same rapidity of speech, at once eager and distracted.

  He indicated a level patch of ground, as bare as the rest but marked out with a stone border. “I planted water melons, pompions, guinea peas. And sallet—you can have no idea how much I long for a bit of sallet, it is highly beneficial for the blood in this climate. But the damn crabs came up out of the river and devoured everything in a single night. When I looked at it in the morning it was as bare as you see it now. I never thought to make a fence against crabs, you see. There was a fence, but it was not proof against those devils, they got underneath. I never had the heart to try again. Nowadays, any time I encounter a crab, I put an end to its life.”

  A smell of excrement and wood smoke came over to them from the barracoon. ‘My mind was all on larger beasts,” Owen said. “I never thought of anything getting underneath. Well, gentlemen, here they are, and a finer set of slaves you would have to travel far to see. Through here.”

  It was intensely hot within the shrouded enclosure of the shed. The fires on which their food had been cooked were still smouldering; the smoke was acrid, Paris felt it stinging his eyes. He peered through the miasmic interior. All nine of the slaves, men and women alike, were shackled in a line to a long metal bar that ran down the centre of the barracoon.

  They were completely naked. One or two looked up but most remained staring before them. The smell of excrement was stronger now, combining with the sour smell of metal and the body-musk of the Africans to form a compound which Paris had begun to recognize as the odour of captivity. Nausea stirred in him. ‘We’d better look at them out in the open,” he said.

  One by one, under the guard of two men with spears, the negroes were unshackled and brought out, blinking in the stronger light. Paris went through the sequence of peering, prodding and palpating now become familiar, beginning always with the face, the teeth and gums, the red pools between lid and eyeball, the pits of the nostrils. Custom had reduced his repugnance for the task but, perhaps paradoxically, had increased his sense of the humanity of the captives. He was beginning to know, with the same strange combination of sympathy and dispassion, the patterns of colour on an African body, zones of dark and less dark.

  There was not the same pulse of fear in these negroes. They had been penned here a week now, and fear had passed into some more quiescent misery.

  Freed, they moved heavily as if still in chains, performing the kicks and jumps required of them with dazed docility. Three of the men were fine specimens, long-limbed and broad-shouldered, with powerful muscles in the arms and chest; but they were in a nightmare trance like the others and made no resistance.

  In the second of the women he examined he detected enlarged neck glands. In order to be quite sure of it he lingered for some time, pressing gently at the sides of the woman’s neck.

  “Something wrong?”’ Simmonds said. He had been following Paris’s examination with his usual phlegmatic air, whistling between his teeth and occasionally kicking at the slaves, more from habit than anything else, it seemed, as they were quite unresisting.

  “She has greatly enlarged lymph glands,”

  Paris said.

  “Let’s have a look. Lift your head up, darlin”.” Simmonds tapped the woman lightly, almost playfully, under the chin with the back of his hand. ‘allyes,” he said after a moment. “Oh, yes.” He looked at Owen. “We can’t take this one. She has got the negro lethargy, what they calls sleepy-sickness. I seen swellin’s like them before. This here is a dead woman.”

  “I didn’t detect anything,” Owen said. “I gave a good price for her.”

  “That is as may be,” Simmonds said without emotion. “But she is not worth a groat now, to you or anyone. They always dies when they get them balls in the neck.”

  The woman remained impassive, staring before her with discoloured eyes. A small pulse beat at her temple. Her mouth hung very slightly open; the everted lips were dark lavender in colour and puffy-looking, as if swollen. If she felt curiosity as to why her captors were spending so long over her, she gave no sign of it. Her gaze showed nothing but an exhausted endurance.

  “Let me see.” Owen stepped forward, felt the sides of the woman’s neck for some moments, then turned to the others with his uncertain smile. “That is nothing, take my word for it,” he said. “It is some feverish inflammation that will soon pass.”

  “I am sorry,” Paris said, “but I fear Simmonds is right. They are glandular tumours, quite prominent. I cannot be mistaken, I felt them quite distinctly. The blood is already morbid in her. I know nothing of how this sickness comes but I believe it is generally fatal. It is here you feel the lumps, towards the vertebral region.”

  He touched the woman’s neck again to indicate the place, then felt round the whole area of the neck and shoulders. The skin was smooth and resilient.

  “Here,” he insisted, “in the hinder part of the neck. I am sorry, but we cannot take her.”

  “It seems them fellers bubbled you after all, Mr Owen,” Simmonds said, and his normally rather bovine expression lightened perceptibly.

  “Nekkid or not,” he added, winking broadly at Paris, to whom the mate’s jocularity at such a moment seemed insensitive to the point of
sublimity.

  Owen looked from Paris’s face to that of the woman.

  He had nodded his head at the medical details in what seemed an attempt at dignified dispassion.

  But at Simmonds’s remark his eyes widened and he swallowed convulsively. “God rot me,” he said. “How can a man make a living here? These people…” He gestured at the impassive tribesmen, who stood waiting in positions of loose attention, their long spears resting on the ground. “You can’t trust anyone. Everything you try and do… You buy a slave in good faith, perhaps you overlook something, we can’t always… It is true I had been drinking a little when they came in; I have had a bad bout of fever and I needed the rum to get me through. I am not through it yet, as a matter of fact. I am quite alone here, you know. There is no one…”

  His mood, which had veered towards self-pity with these last words, and the sense of his solitude, grew suddenly inflamed again as he glanced at the diseased slave. His lower lip had begun to tremble. With a violent gesture, startling to those around, he took off his hat and cast it with all his force on the ground before him. He took a stride towards the woman, advancing his face furiously at her. “God damn your eyes,” he shouted, “I am not going to feed you, do you hear? Do you think I am running a charity?”’

  The woman was astounded. A strained and staring quality of alertness had appeared on her face.

  Some low and broken sounds came from her that might have been words of entreaty. She shrank from the inexplicable fury on the white face near her own, glanced quickly to either side of her as if seeking a path for flight, then wildly up at the blank and colourless sky above the barracoon.

  ‘Do you hear me?”’ Owen seized her arm and tugged at her as if in an infuriated attempt to compel her straying attention. “Not another mouthful,” he shouted. “You can get out.”

  Enfeebled by illness and emotion, he could not drag her back and forth as he seemed to intend. With an effort he swung her round and pushed her violently forward so that she took some staggering steps towards the edge of the trees. Liberated thus, she stopped and stood still for some moments, as if incredulous. She raised her head to look again at the sky. There was blood round her ankles with the chafing of the fetters. It came to Paris, with a sensation of surprise, that she was beautiful.