Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  ‘Dat you big trouble, you never change. You alius try make adder people belong you idea. Like you play game wit dem, move here, move dere, like amati game, you sabee? You try make people here dis place do like you want, so you feel good, make man free. Den Paree feel good, oh-hoh! No feel bad no more, make man free, win de game. But Kireku not piece amati game pick up, put down. I no stay in place you want.

  I strong pas” you. You a fool. You tink dis speshul place but it altageddar same adder place. Iboti, Callee, Libbee, dese men slave, you no change dat never. Go look for Iboti now, where you find him? Find him Tongman field, workin’ for Tongman. I build hut need man guard dat hut, build boat need boatman, do trade need porter for cargo. Need dem all de time, not jus’ when dey wan’. Dat de way ting go dis worl’, Paree, where you been?

  Dis de real worl’, you no sabee dat?”’

  ‘Thurso was another who talked about the real world,” Paris said after a moment and as if to himself.

  He looked at Kireku and attempted a smile.

  “Funny ting,” he said. “Dey talk bout real worl”, dey never mean real worPeople where man help adder man or spend him life do good for people, dey alius mean real worl’ like rat in de cellar or dung-heap cock try git on top.”

  Kireku said nothing to this and it was clear from his face that he thought it not worth answering.

  Paris too sat silent for some time. It was not so much the force and penetration of the other’s argument that daunted him, considerable as these were, but the certainty and finality of the tone. He sought for a memory of Kireku aboard the slaveship, as if some clue to their present impasse could be found there. But no such memory was available to his mind. That shuffling, clanking dance to the sound of Sullivan’s fiddle, the mass of listless limbs and faces in the shadow of the awning amidships, the terrible cries from the fetid darkness of the hold, the stench of defecation, the corpses one so like another… Somewhere among those herded, brutalized people, featureless, indistinguishable in misery from the rest, this drive to power still dormant, undcld. Perhaps it could only have declared itself here, he thought, with a painful sense of paradox. His mind staggered suddenly at the thought of what manifold talents, what capacities for good and ill, had been thrown from the deck of the Liverpool Merchant to feed the sharks. The moral argument, he now saw, had been a mistake, they were both trapped in the same bog. Perhaps all that was left was the argument of expediency. He thought of Delblanc and his doctrine of necessity. Even freedom and equality might be seen as necessities of survival…

  ‘My life in dis place, jus” like you life,” he said, in low tones. ‘Some man weak, some man not clever, I same mind wit you ‘bout dat. But suppose I use weak man make me strong pas” adder people an’ you do same-same ting, den we go fight, dis place altagedder finish.”

  But he knew as he spoke that he had failed, that the discussion was over.

  ‘allyou wrong.” Kireku smiled, a genial smile of complete equanimity. He now wore the same air as when Paris had first arrived: unruffled, sure of himself and his world.

  “Barton,” he said, “I cold, go git my jackit.”

  ‘Aye-aye.”

  Kireku nodded humorously at Paris.

  “Barton no slave,” he said. “Barton too close me, he too bad man for slave. Poor Paree, you no sabee nottin”, no sabee de shit of de fire from de burnin’ of de fire. I no ask come here. Now I here I fight for place.

  Strong man get rich, him slave get rich.

  Strong man make everybody rich. Everybody dis place happy an’ rich come from trade. Some man not free, nevermind, buggerit, trade free. Dis palaver finish now. Barton, take Paree show him way along.”

  It was a dismissal. Kireku looked austerely away while Paris rose and barely acknowledged his departure. As instructed, Barton walked some way with him.

  The former mate seemed disposed to say something on his own account and they stood together for a few minutes some way beyond Amansa’s cooking fire. The last of the sunshine lay over the settlement and there was no breath of wind. Smoke from the fires rose in slow plumes and the cabbage palms outside the stockade stood motionless and stiff, the dead, withered lower fronds bright rust-colour where the sun caught them.

  Barton’s face still bore some traces of the amusement which the recent conversation seemed to have afforded him. ‘Kireku is in the right of it,” he said.

  “He hasn’t had the benefits of a lib’ral eddication, but he got the better of you. Stands to reason, you will not stop men of talent from risin” up, any more than you can stop cuddies like Iboti from sinkin’. You will never stop ooman bein’s tryin’ to improve themselves, that is the way we go forrad.”

  ‘Improve themselves?”’ Paris was tired and discouraged and disinclined for further talk, but a kind of curiosity kept his attention directed to the other man now. The years had leeched colour from Barton’s eyes and dishevelled his brows and put grey into his wiry, ragged beard; but the peering, relishing expression was the same as ever, the shape of felicitous syllables forming on the thin mouth—these things would be the same until the day he breathed his last. “You think it an improvement when we prosper at the expense of others and reduce them and take away their dignity?”’ Paris had a sense, half resigned, half despairing, that the terms he was using were in the wrong language.

  “It is a very selective notion of improvement.”

  “You’re a regglar sticker, you are.” Barton spat delicately aside to express his disgust.

  “You got no sense of the future. If it was left to you, the march of ooman betterment would be slowed down to a crawl, we would be in the doldrums without breeze enough to give steerage way.” There had risen to his face the old look of pleasure at the rich resources of language. “We have got to reach out for somethin”,” he said virtuously. ‘Take a bebby now, what is the first thing you will see a bebby do?

  He sees somethin” before his eyes, he reaches for it.

  He don’t know what it is, might be a lump of shit, might be a di’mond. He has got to learn for hisself. When we stops reachin’ out, we are done for.”

  ‘Last time you reached out you came near to losing your scalp,” Paris said, with a degree of unkindness unusual in him. “You only saved it, I seem to remember, by keeping pretty low to the ground.”

  Barton spat again. “Times a man has to keep his head down,” he said. “Any fool knows that.”

  There was a truculence in his manner which seemed new to Paris; it indicated—better perhaps than anything else could have done—the divisions that were growing among the people now. “Times change,” he went on after a moment. “This place is changin”. There is pickin’s now such as never before. The land between us and the Still John is almost empty—these local Indians are poxed-out an’ dyin’. We know there is peace now with the French and Spanish. The seas will be safer— we can trade skins to Cuba. The English have took Florida for King George, there is an English Gov’nor in place now in Still Augustine; we shall have justidge an’ fair play, no more of these blaggard dons linin’ their pockets an’ grindin’ down the people. I will tell you somethin’ now, I am a man that sees ahead. There will be a place up there for a man like me, I am a serviceable fellow. Do you think I am goin’ to rot down here the rest of my nat’ral life? Why do you think I answer to that black devil now?”’

  His face had grown envenomed as he spoke and his voice had risen. It was clear that Kireku’s contemptuous treatment was resented more than Barton dared openly show—resented enough to take the guard off his tongue now. Or perhaps, Paris thought, it was this he had wanted to say all along, the rhetoric about human aspiration merely a preamble. Barton was devious enough and probably by this time more than a little mad. Asserting a readiness to betray Kireku might seem to him like proof of integrity.

  “I do not know why,” Paris said.

  “I use him to serve my turn,” Barton said, in a rapid and confidential tone. “I wasn’t Thurso’s fool and I ain’t Kirek
u’s neither.

  I am waitin” my time.” He raised a finger and laid it along his thin nose. ‘I keep my nose to the wind,” he said. “I am a man that sees ahead, I tell you.”

  Paris was silent for a short while. He was aware, as always with Barton, of a mystery. You could not call such a man wicked even; he seemed to have his being below distinctions of good and evil, in some sunless Eden of his own. “You see ahead, Barton, God help us,” he said. “But what a man sees must still depend on what he looks for. While I have got eyes of my own, I shall not need to borrow yours.”

  With this he turned away and left the other standing there. He made his way back to his own hut and remained there for some time in total silence and immobility. Then he thought of the clearing in the pine hummock where he had sometimes gone when his spirit was heavy. He would go there and sit for a while and let the accustomed descent of evening bring its peace.

  He took the track that led in the direction of the lagoon. On reaching the edge of the pine ridge he glanced back. From where he was standing most of the settlement was invisible, cut off from sight by the trees. He could see the pale gleam of sunshine on the thatched roofs of the nearer huts. The stockade gates were open. Just beyond them, on the level ground before the first of the trees, children were playing together.

  They were full in the sunlight. He could see the rapid play of their shadows as they moved. No voices came to him at first and he could not determine the nature of the game. There was a line of small children, somehow linked together, perhaps tied.

  Two larger boys, armed with sticks, appeared to be guarding them. A group of older children stood in a cluster some yards off. Kenka was among these: there was a quality of eagerness in his son’s slight figure recognizable to Paris even at this distance. A moment later he picked out the form of Tekka, tallest of the group. There was one standing slightly apart—it was the mulatto boy, Fonga, whom he knew well, having treated him regularly for an inveterate condition of congested sinuses. Fonga was a delicate, rather gangling boy, a year younger than Kenka, not well coordinated in his movements, something of a butt for the others. One of the guards, Paris now realized, was not a boy at all, though as tall as most of the boys there—it looked like Lamina, whose life he had saved when she was a baby.

  As he stood there the wish rose in him to know the nature of the game they were playing. It came as a reprieve from his unhappiness; and then there was something potently suggestive in the way they had grouped themselves, something of ceremony or accustomed ritual about it, in this last, lingering sunlight of the day.

  He saw Fonga point at the line of small children. The guards raised their sticks and made whipping motions at the captives. It was a game of slavery… Then Kenka stepped forward, a lonely figure between the group he had left and the linked line of slaves. Paris saw the raised hand, the uplifted face. The echo of the shout came to him —it was the first sound he was conscious of hearing. He understood now what the game was and he was swept by the poignancy of his son’s loneliness there, immobile, his arm stiffly raised, between opposed factions. Paris knew that the loneliness was his too and had never changed, the same now as at the moment of his intervention on the deck of the slaveship.

  It was Fonga who played Thurso and this too was only to be expected, he thought. Power had its ironies of reversal; the weaker had been coerced or cajoled into performing the detested role of the strong.

  Entirely appropriate too that it should be Kenka, with his eagerness to shine and to excel, who had secured the empty role of glory, over in seconds, leaving him with nothing more to do.

  With close attention he watched the game to its conclusion, saw Thurso draw his pistol, saw Cavana make the gesture of throwing the heavy spike which had destroyed the captain’s right eye and sent him staggering back against the bulkhead. Then came the wild shot that brought down Tapley with a shattered leg—performed now with much impressive writhing by a boy he did not recognize.

  Tapley’s wound had turned gangrenous and he had died five days later. Tekka the cynic it was who struck the decisive blow. As Rimmer, he stepped forward while the cursing Thurso fumbled to reload, and stabbed the captain to the heart.

  A great advantage of the stage that actions of irrevocable violence could be endlessly repeated, modified, Paris thought, as he resumed his way.

  Some profounder sense of the difference lay in his mind, though he could not immediately express it to himself. The sunlit arena, the quick shadows of the children… It was the orderliness of the performance, mysterious in its effect, that marked it off from the confused reality. This, to the touch of his memory, was glutinous with blood, thick with discordant sound, grotesque, Tapley’s groans mingling with the imprecations of Thurso, as their blood was to mingle on the deck, Cavana shouting at the wounded captain about a drowned monkey, the late appearance on the scene of Delblanc, still in his nightshirt.

  Of course, Jimmy must have related the events in precise order. Jimmy was a good teacher. He was one of those who had stumbled on a vocation here. He was gifted alike at pointing a moral or adorning a tale. And this was history now: heroic protest, concerted rebellion, execution of the tyrant, a new social order. It ran like a clear stream— useless to require it to resemble the viscous substance of truth.

  52.

  With nightfall people began to congregate outside Neema’s hut. Mats had been spread and there was a good fire. Neema sat at the entrance, the baby in her lap, greeting the visitors as they arrived with their gifts and good wishes. She had been busy with preparations since the closing of the Palaver that morning, sweeping out the hut and the space all around, cooking, tending the fire, pausing only to give milk to the baby. At the approach of the dark she had stopped and gone to dress herself in her best, then taken up her position here. The results of all this labour lay spread on a litter of sea-grape leaves. Calley’s eyes glistened at the sight and the lean Sullivan invoked the saints. There were pieces of boiled fish, kebabs of venison on cane spits, a sweet dough made from acorn meal and dried coco plum. Various people had made contributions. Tabakali, a friend and near neighbour, had made koonti cakes for the occasion; the day before, Danka, most accomplished of hunters, who had a friendship for Tiamoko in spite of conflicting trade interests, had brought a big turkey which he had stalked and shot on the edges of the cypress swamp; the unpredictable and taciturn Hughes surprised everyone by presenting a wild honeycomb and then leaving almost immediately. Children of various ages moved among the guests, round-eyed with excitement at so many voices, the leaping of the fire, the display of food. Tiamoko and Cavana, both a little drunk by this time, gave out the beer. It was Neema’s first boy and they had used up their entire stock of wild grain to brew enough beer for the party.

  By the time Paris arrived things were in full swing.

  Fortified with beer, Sullivan had already given the company a couple of reels on his fiddle. He had now been joined by Sefadu with a cane flute limited in range but piercing in sound and by Danka with a finger drum made of deerskin stretched over a hollowed-out section of black gum tree. These three had performed at similar gatherings before and varied in their effects from a loud and cheerful dissonance to occasional wild harmony.

  Paris went up to Neema and laid his gift on the ground before her, beside the others. He had not much skill in making things, but during the summer he had discovered a variety of sapodilla tree and had collected a number of the seeds with a view to planting them in the spring. They were like flattened beans in appearance and glossy black. He had strung some of them on plaited palm fibre to make an unusual, and distinctly handsome, neckband. “Dis for de boy when he liddle old pas” now,” he said. “I wish he live long time for you.”

  He looked down at the baby, which returned his gaze with singular intensity. Its eyelids were polished and shiny, as if by some gently frictive agency of the air; they were tiny the narrowest of rims for eyes so amazingly lustrous that they seemed to take up all the face. The hands were
the only other visible part. Paris had seen a good many babies in his time, but the perfection of the hands moved him always. In the light of the fire he could see the paler webs at the base of the fingers and the tiny pink cracks of the knuckles as the baby gripped the edge of its blanket with the oddly fussy, faintly spasmodic clutch that marks the very young.

  “What name you give him?”’ Only now could this be asked: it was never divulged until the evening of the naming, for fear of the ill-fortune that could so easily come from premature and presumptuous mention of a name.

  “Him name Kavamoko.” Neema smiled.

  She was happy. She knew she made a good appearance in her shell necklace and blue cotton wrap; the baby had been much admired and the party was going well. She nodded in the direction of her two men. “Dey two give him half piece one name half piece adder,” she said indulgently.

  Her eyes were as bright as the baby’s and Paris saw the reflection of the firelight move in them.

  Some touch of awe came to his mind. The seated woman, prepared and composed, the simple thatch behind her, the gifts before her on the swept earth, the regard of the baby that seemed full of some precocious knowledge… “I wish he live long an” happy for you,” he said.

  ‘Dis de fust man pikin,” she said. “Dey two give de name.”

  “It a very good name,” Paris said.

  As he spoke the music ceased and Cavana stepped forward holding his battered pewter tankard, once the possession of the dead gunner, Johnson.

  Tiamoko meanwhile was making sure that everyone had enough beer to drink the impending toast. In his troubled preoccupation of earlier, Paris had forgotten a cardinal point of etiquette, which was to bring one’s own drinking vessel on occasions of this kind; now there was found for him one of the pumpkin calabashes held in reserve for the forgetful and for people like Calley, whose personal possessions did not extend even thus far.

  “De boy name Kavamoko,” Cavana said, when silence among the guests had been achieved.