Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  Such an act would assert the principles of freedom and natural justice on which he hoped to found this infant republic of his dreams. And it might well improve relations with the Indians, fear of whom, after the terrible death of Haines, had kept them penned in this narrow space of woodland between the exposed shore and the flooded savannah behind. But he had seen further than this. With a perception colder than he had believed possible in himself-and herein lay the element of revelation—he had seen at once that what became of the Indians was in a way a secondary issue: the slave-takers had to be killed in any case.

  It was their death that he argued for, with all the force at his command, speaking directly to Paris and the people of the crew, leaving Jimmy to make the best of it he could, knowing that the whites, though in a minority, were more cohesive, had a certain ascendancy still, which would not last long but might be exploited now; knowing too that the intention to kill the men must be formed and stated here, not left to the chances of the pursuit.

  “We have no choice,” he said. “It makes no difference what is decided about the Indians and what are the rights and wrongs of rescuing them.

  Personally, I think they should be rescued. But above all the men who have taken them must be killed. Some of you have already said it. Suppose they come back?

  Suppose they have seen some of us? We cannot afford not to suppose it. They might return in more strength.

  Even if not, can we take the risk of stories about us being carried up and down the coast? You know we cannot.

  We must go after them now, before they escape us.”

  Delblanc was a man transformed. He was still wearing the waistcoat and breeches with which he had left the ship, torn and muddied now; but nothing else about him seemed the same. The years of vague theory, half-ironic rhetoric, generous, egalitarian sympathy, came together now in this focus of fierce clarity. More than he had wanted anything in his life, he wanted this desperate experiment to succeed. All the people before him, black and white, whether they knew it or not, had been enslaved. He intended now that they should live in peace and freedom, without coercion, in this untouched corner where they found themselves. Four lives seemed little against such a dream.

  To Paris, his friend’s face had become unrecognizable almost, cold, preoccupied and yet elated too. “You are talking about killing four men in cold blood,” he said.

  “Yes, I am, of course I am,”

  Delblanc said, with a vehemence barely held in check. “Don’t be a fool, Matthew. Are you 5r7 suggesting it should be left to the bungling of hot blood, a thing like this, affecting the lives of all of us?”’

  For a moment then it had seemed to Paris that here, in the close heat of this rocky clearing where they stood, with the cicadas loud around them and the sun harsh on the blades of the palmetto, they were once more engaged in the old argument as to the relative merits of reason and nature that had occupied so much of their time aboard the Liverpool Merchant. But now the positions were reversed: it was Delblanc now who was the enemy of impulse…

  For a moment Paris continued to look into his friend’s face, uncertain how to answer. Then quite suddenly he knew that this man, whose openness had so drawn him, was leaving his deeper reasons unspoken. It was typical of Paris that to understand this by intuition was to feel partly convicted of it himself. He was going to speak but Delblanc, as if sensing himself discovered, drew closer and muttered, too low for anyone else’s ears: “We must kill them. Don’t you see? It is providential comthey are mixed white and black, just as we are. By killing them we cancel the distinction. It is the only way… It is the only thing that will keep us together.”

  That had been the knowledge shared by these two, never afterwards referred to by either. But it was Tiamoko who settled things. He came from a society where the respect of women was important, and the scorn of the Foulani woman had affected him more than his impassive demeanour had indicated. With an abrupt swing of mood he now stepped forward and declared himself willing to kill these slave-takers alone and unaided if need be.

  Others followed suit. In the end all the men took part in the pursuit, divided into two groups, one keeping close to the line of the shore, the other, guided by Hughes, striking further inland. But for the sake of silence and surprise only six made the final approach, three white and three black, and they were drawn by lot once it was known where the slave-takers had camped.

  “Who dem six?”’ All the children knew the names: Paree, Kavna, Barba, Kireku, Kadu, Zobi. It was a roll of heroes.

  “Dey foller dem slave-taker. Now it git dark, night come down.’Jimmy opened his eyes as wide as they would go. ‘What dey go do? Dem slave-taker ‘fraid in de night-time, dey ‘fraid crocdile, for sample. What else dey ‘fraid of?”’

  “Dey ‘fraid snake.”

  “Dey ‘fraid leppid.”

  The children always took part eagerly at this stage, sharing these fears in large measure. “Dey ‘fraid black bear,” Tekka said.

  “You right, boy. You great man for black bear, an’t you? Dem slave-taker ‘fraid dey own shadder. Why dat? Dat ‘cause dey bad wickit man, dey sabee take sell slave bad ting too much, dey feel bad inside demself. But us people go after dem no ‘fraid. Why dat?”’

  “Dey more of us.”

  “No, Sammy, dat not de answer. Us not ‘fraid ‘cause us in de right. When you in de right, you heart strong, you no ‘fraid nottin”. So dey camp on de bank, make fire, set one man watch. Den dey go sleep. Indian still tied tagedder. Now dese slave-taker bad man too much but us people no go for kill dem, very bad kill anadder man, we all man got to live tagedder in dis world, but dis time got to kill for free dem slave…”

  Sitting outside the small hut adjoining his sickroom that he used when not with Tabakali, Paris thought about those distant killings again now. He could never see Hughes without some memory of them.

  There were men and women like this in the settlement, so charged with a particular event that they carried an evocative aura about them.

  It had been about this time when they set off in pursuit, evening, the sky draining slowly to an opalescent, milky blue. With the approach of darkness they heard the cry of frogs, some solitary voices at first, then the great glimmering expanse of flooded saw-grass had resounded with them, a loud, unbroken, pulsing chorus, strangely like sustained lamentation to Paris’s ears.

  The men they were following had bivouacked on a sandbank among sea-grape trees and palmetto, as high as they could get above the water. They had lit a fire and one had settled to watch, a white man, musket across his knees. The Indians they had roped to a tree. Paris remembered the firelight on the pale 5J9 trunks of the sea-grape trees, and the shadows of their long, deformed-looking branches.

  That ceaseless litany of the frogs had concealed all sound of their approach. The Shantee, Kireku, had gone first, tall and lithe and soft-footed, with a visible appetite for murder. Or is it only now, Paris wondered, in the distrust and division of these later times, that I attribute this to him?

  Kireku had slashed the guard’s throat from behind before he could stir or utter a cry. But the man had choked and bubbled in his death and one of the others had started up, seen the moving forms and shouted once before Barber reached him, chopped at him with the short axe he had brought among his carpenter’s tools from the ship, pursued him still chopping as he tried to crawl away. The others were roused now. All Paris could remember, after this bloodied, crawling form in the firelight, was a confused and violent struggle in which Zobi had been struck down by the stock of a musket and he himself had shot with his pistol the man wielding the musket, a powerful negro, shot him through the body, seen him blunder away through the trees and followed, not knowing how badly hurt he might be, and found him coughing out his life in the dimness beyond the light of the fire. Expiring in blood, the negro had begged to be spared. Paris remembered the eyes fixed on him, the soft mumble of the voice. And he remembered the hush that had fallen all around himself and this d
ying stranger. He had not been able to understand it at first, then he realized that his shot had silenced the frogs.

  On this blood and that of Wilson, whose death was still to come, their small republic had been founded. This was the Battle of Red Creek, as Jimmy told the children—he knew the importance of names. The colour came from the red stain in the water made by the fallen mangrove leaves.

  The Indians they had taken back with them, still bound. By yet another stratagem deriving from the inspired Delblanc they had only been released later, ceremonially, before the whole people. They were copper-coloured, slender but robust, small-boned, with long straight black hair and depthless, glittering eyes. They had remained mute in the hands of their new captors and they made no sound when released from their bonds, refusing the food that was offered them, seeming slow to understand that they were free but then slipping quickly away and vanishing into the darkness.

  Gratitude, however, there had been, or acknowledgement at least. Two days later, a party of twenty men, their bodies shining with oil, their hair dressed with ornaments of shell and bone, came in deputation under the leadership of one with a headband of feathers and heavy earrings of shell-lining. They sat for an hour in complete silence and left gifts of shell ornament and carved arrowheads, sour oranges brought from abandoned Spanish settlements further north, above all cakes made from koonti flour: it was to these Indians that the people of the settlement owed the knowledge of the koonti plant that had given them their staple food. From the Indians too, in the course of time, they had obtained the foundations of their husbandry, pumpkin seeds, tubers of sweet potato. They had made gifts in their turn, in the early days, using goods brought off the ship, clasp-knives and kettles which it had been Thurso’s intention to sell off in Jamaica. Some, like Cavana and Tongman and the Shantee people, had joined by degrees in the trade in skins with the settlements on the banks of the Still John River to the north.

  These neighbouring Indians, whose faces were tattooed in a pattern of concentric circles coloured red and blue, though hunting and fishing over the same grounds and though skirmishing incessantly with tribes to the west of them, offered the settlement no further hostility. For them too the past merged easily into legend. The story of this rescue was repeated among them, the alliance became a kind of custom and went unquestioned.

  There could be no doubt of it Delblanc had been right: in saving the three Indians they had preserved themselves and made possible the survival of their colony. Not long afterwards the execution of Wilson had brought acceptance of the need for the men to share the women, a problem on which they had nearly foundered, though it had been a matter of simple arithmetic from the start with only fourteen females surviving.

  Twelve years, Paris thought. Twelve floodings of the saw-grass plain, with the great freshwater sea slowly flowing southwards, following the gradual tilt of the land.

  Twelve dry seasons with the mud cracking and the eroded shapes of the rock exposed, and the alligator, which Paris had long ago observed to be the true benefactor of these marshes, burrowing in the mud and maintaining small colonies of life in the water-holes thus made. One of the most ancient of beasts, an aboriginal reptile. He had watched them whenever he could, marvelling at the perfect adaptation to the circumstances of their lives. In this case, for reasons obscure to him, there seemed to have been no diversifying of the species. The alligator had neither died nor changed. The churchmen who had pilloried and imprisoned him and given him before ever he stepped on to the deck of a slaveship the horror of degradation that had led him by devious courses to this place, they might have pointed to the alligator as a proof of original creation, one of those who had voyaged with Noah. Climates might have cooled and warmed again, mountains risen, continents formed, but in the watery recesses of the world this same beast lived on. And it was because he was perfect.

  ..

  On such a scale of time the twelve years of the colony was too short for detection, let alone measurement, it was less than a breath. Yet it was a whole life to him in the beating of his heart. He had been happier than he could have believed possible in this forgotten corner. But increasingly nowadays it seemed to him that this short history was assuming, had assumed, a definite shape, determined by the violence of its beginnings. A shape implies an end… With a sudden deep uneasiness he thought again now of Kireku and of those who moved in his orbit, Barton, Libby, men by nature subservient, quick to see a rising power. Kireku was growing rich— he had trade links not only to the north but even, it was said, with the sea-going Indians who crossed the straits in their dugouts, carrying dried fish and heron plumes and freshwater pearls to the Spanish islands. The man who had accused Iboti of witchcraft was a fellow-tribesman of Kireku …

  Made restless by these thoughts, Paris got up, crossed the corner of the compound and passed through the gate in the stockade. He walked some way through the forested ground that lay on the seaward side of the settlement until he found the little rocky eminence among the tall slash-pines where he often sat in early evening, his favourite time here as it had been at home in England. Trailings of cloud had formed earlier but these cleared as he sat there and the sky took on a look of readiness for the dark, that depthless clarity which is no colour and the womb of all colours.

  He was looking eastward to where the sea lay, invisible but always present, revealed by something wild in the quality of the light above it. They had built their huts out of sight of the sea on the slightly higher ground between the barrier hummocks near the shore and the lagoons and grasslands behind, a site affording some defence against marauders and some protection from the storms that swept the coast in late summer, while still open to the prevailing sea breezes that combed through the pineland ridges and freshened the exhalations of the swamps.

  It seemed to Paris as he sat there that he had somehow earned the right not merely to live in this place but to love it—a stronger claim of possession, one enforced by the things of deepest familiarity that surrounded him, the invisible sea that cast its light, the dark snake-birds already flying up to roost in the high branches, the breeze moving in the palmettos, stirring the leaves against the palm trunks with a sound like the faint clashing of cymbals, the slender blades of the leaves themselves, curving in perfect gradation like the first whorl of a green shell. Fear of loss gave a sharper intensity to his perception. This was the place that suffering and crime had made their own, where he had been able to save some lives and ease some pain, where he had found a refuge and a physical passion undreamt of in the arms of a woman still in most ways a stranger to him.

  A vagrant beam of sunlight fell across the clearing and lay briefly on the papery bark of a gum-resin tree, lighting the peeling strips to a red glow, as if the tree were burning. The upper branches were hung with drapes of green moss, dark in the centre, fluffed with sunlight at the edges.

  Paris looked up beyond this, to where branch and foliage and festooning moss melted and fused into a single veil-like substance. Slowly his anxieties receded.

  As he began to return he was met by a voice calling for him through the trees and knew it by something sorrowing in the tone for that of Kenka, who was Tabakali’s son and—though this had never been declared between him and the boy—his too.

  ‘Here,” he called and after a moment saw the boy come out into the small clearing and approach silently.

  Kenka followed him sometimes for no seeming reason but to be in his company and this gave great pleasure to Paris, who had from Kenka’s earliest infancy watched him and sometimes stalked him as it were about the place, to find occasion to speak to him. Children lived with their mothers and they had all the men for their fathers, such at least was the general principle. But it happened sometimes that men took a particular interest in those they knew for their own. Paris had seen his own lineaments in the child’s face, in the shape of his eyes and the set of his mouth; and he had known that this was his and Tabakali’s child and the child that Ruth had not lived to give him. />
  “How you sabee I here dis place?”’ Paris said.

  “I see you talk Oose, see you go,” the boy said. He had eyes that seemed to look inward until startled by speech, and in this he was like his mother.

  Tabakali’s too the straight shoulders, the sturdy column of the neck, the quick, restless turns of the head. But the look of patient enquiry his face would assume, this was all his father’s. He wore the look now. “What Oose say?”’ he asked.

  Paris said gravely, “Oose climb tree see ship stay two-three day. He tink hum-hum, pass by, tell me.”

  Kenka reflected for a moment but it was clear from his next words that he was not interested in this news of the ship. “Oose ken climb anyting,” he said.

  “Ken you?”’

  “Some man good dis, some man good dat.

  Everybody climb tree, who go catch fish? You want walk dis way?”’

  The boy had a small, particular smile for proposals that pleased him. “You good more ting dan Oose,” he said. He had a way of prefacing certain of his words with a light frictive sound, not quite a consonant; a habit derived from the Foulani speech habits of his mother, with whom he talked more quickly and easily than with Paris, using with her some African words.

  As they walked along together, Paris felt his hand taken in a small, tenacious paw. “One time in de class,” Kenka said, “Tekka say Oose climb dat tree he see slave-taker cos black bear after him arse. Dat de trut?”’

  “What Jimmy say?”’ Paris asked cautiously. There were aspects of Jimmy’s teaching he was not sure he approved of.

  “Jimmy say dat not in de story.”

  They had come now to the edge of the jungle hummock that lay just below the pine ridges. The path they were following opened on to the bank of a shallow, brackish lagoon. They heard the plop of a turtle as they approached the water and two grey doves flew up from the undergrowth at the edge. “How ken Jimmy sabee everyting in de story?”’ the boy persisted.