The attic was warmer now—warm enough to allow me to move my hands, pausing only occasionally to hold them above the lamp chimney. And so I put my hands on the folio, feeling the leather cool and smooth and worn beneath my hands. I slid my fingers along the flap, watching as the wax seal crumbled, bit by bit by bit.
197903071030 (Wednesday)
IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1441, a Portuguese sailing captain named Antam Gonçalvez permitted a certain light-skinned Moorish gentleman, who was then enjoying the captain’s hospitality, to ransom himself and two young male companions at the expense of ten dark-skinned gentlemen and gentlewomen from the sub-Sahara. This incident marks the beginning of the phenomenon known as the African Slave Trade.
In recent years the study of the Trade has become something of a cause célèbre, for a perusal of its grim details offers white historians a gold-plated opportunity to prove their liberality and objectivity, and at the same time offers black historians—the few who can get jobs—a chance to escape the paternalistic scrutiny of senior faculty members who do not quite believe that the darkies can say anything useful about anything that does not concern darkies. And so we know a great deal—perhaps too much—about the ins and outs of the Slave Trade; any historian worth his research assistant can shock the joviality right out of a cocktail party by saying, yes, between ten and twelve million Africans were brought to the New World between 1510 and 1865 (a small matter of a fifth of the Christian calendar), and that while losses sustained during the Middle Passage were much lower than is commonly believed (a mere 13 percent to 19 percent), those incurred during the capture, the march to the coast, and the sojourn in the “barracoons” (hence the term “coon”) awaiting transport were substantial enough to raise overall mortality to between 30.4 percent and 39.25 percent, indicating that between 14,367,000 and 19,753,000 Africans were actually kidnapped (in round figures, of course). If such dry business does not interest the ladies (who may be preoccupied with the concerns of the Women’s Movement), he can always point out that as early as 1538 the Spanish Crown directed that at least a third of the Africans taken be female—tokenism, to be sure, but at least it had an effect; by 1773 the brigantine Ann, a slaver out of New England, was selling women for sixty-two pounds and men for only two pounds more, surely a victory for sexual equality. Then, having grabbed their attention, he can trot out a few specific incidents. He can tell them about the Zong incident of 1781, in which English traders were accused of having dumped one hundred and twenty-three blacks overboard into shark-infested waters in order to claim the insurance (the charge, of course, was conspiracy to defraud). Or he can discuss the 1659 voyage of the Dutch slaver St. Jan, whose captain was so untalented as to have lost one hundred and ten slaves (fifty-nine men, forty-seven women, four children) to various causes (including suicide) during the Middle Passage and then, having reached the Indies, to pile his ship onto a reef and have to abandon her with the rest of his cargo (eighty-seven blacks) shackled below-decks. By that time everybody should need another drink (except the historian, of course; historians are used to such atrocities). The party may have become a bit morose, but never fear; the historian can simply tell the amusing tale of how captains in the employ of the famed patron of exploration Prince Henry the Navigator got so busy slaving they did very little exploring, and the Prince was forced to order them to refrain from actually kidnapping slaves, suggesting that they get them from native middlemen instead. Thus, in 1455, Prince Henry, always a visionary, became the first government official to issue regulations setting aside work for the sole profit of minority small business. That should get a laugh.
But what is really amusing is that even so knowledgeable a historian probably does not understand the African Slave Trade—certainly he does not understand it if he is white. Probably he thinks it has something to do with economics, or with greed, or with lust; most likely he thinks the effects of the Trade can be seen in the shifts of the worldwide balance of power, or the development of the British Industrial Revolution, or—if he is very honest and perceptive—the growth of the European Cultural Tradition. To an extent, he will be correct. But he will also believe that the African Slave Trade is over, that whatever its effects were, they are existing now in and of themselves, waves spreading across a pond, the stone that caused them having long ago come to rest. He will think this because to understand otherwise involves dealing with something so basic, so elemental, so fundamental that it can be faced only if one is forced to face it: death. For that is what the Slave Trade was all about. Not death from poxes and musketry and whippings and malnutrition and melancholy and suicide; death itself. For before the white men came to Guinea to strip-mine field hands for the greater glory of God, King, and the Royal Africa Company, black people did not die.
There was, of course, dying in Africa. It occurred in the proportion (one man, one dying) deemed by many appropriate for the apportionment of voting rights. But the decedent did not die—he simply took up residence in an afterworld that was in many ways indistinguishable from his former estate. Evidence for this is found in more recently observed African practices. Following an expiration, it is common for the living to report seeing the deceased, and carrying on conversations with him. It is also common practice to build him a house and to leave food about for his nourishment. Liquids, including alcoholic beverages, are poured out on the ground for the deceased to enjoy. Tools, such as hunting and fishing implements, are buried with him. The Kalabi fishermen of Nigeria rely on the deceased to enforce tribal kinship norms. In Dahomey, the folk tales report the existence of a “market of the dead,” which suffers from a chronic meat shortage, much to the delight of living purveyors, who take the opportunity to “make a killing,” as the European would say. The Nuer of the Sudan have an institution called “ghost marriage,” whereby a deceased man is the father of all children borne by his widow, no matter how long the delay and even if she should remarry.
One might protest that these are current beliefs, having little to do with those that held sway five centuries ago. It is difficult to counter this protest, since the Europeans were far too busy “trading” to make even the most cursory study of African belief; it was widely believed by them that heathenism was not the proper concern of a white man. There exist, therefore, few records. However, one can counter the protest by pointing out that the first major schism in Christianity did not occur until that religion had existed for over seven hundred years, and the second did not come about for another eight hundred; to postulate a similar stability for African belief over a mere five centuries seems therefore reasonable. One might also protest that these are the primitive beliefs of primitive people. This is beside the point. The simple fact is this: if, following his “death,” a man, never mind if he is accustomed to wearing breechclout or B.V.Ds, hangs about on the corner, talking to his friends, if he has an apartment, eats hoagies or hero sandwiches, drinks Pabst or Budweiser, goes on hunting or fishing trips as a means of relaxing from his job as a policeman or a judge, is vulnerable to price gouging, and can be slapped with a paternity suit, he cannot really be said to be, in the Christian sense of the term, dead.
But when the Europeans came, it was their avowed purpose to Christianize the natives. That avowal was not hypocrisy, or at any rate not purely so. Gonçalvez’ rationale for accepting the suggested exchange was that ten souls are more than three, even if the ten were black, and one of the reasons that few blacks were taken directly from Guinea to the Indies until the late sixteenth century was that transshipping them in Lisbon offered an opportunity to baptize them; when the matter of direct shipment was argued, it was argued by religious sects.
Of course, one must point out that the traders were probably not unaware of the pacifying effect Christianity had had on the slaves of the Roman Empire. And surely the effect in the case of European-style slavery was much the same; thus, in 1845, a group of South Carolina slaveholders published a pamphlet on “the practical working and wholesome effects of religious instru
ction, when properly and judiciously imparted to our Negro peasantry.” These wholesome effects, of course, would only be achieved so long as the more humane lessons of the Christian religion were not applied with too much zeal. (Such was the case; a manual, On the Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the Southern States, written for the enlightenment of missionary workers and published, in 1847, by the Presbyterian Board of Publications, advises that “civil conditions” be at all times ignored.) And so the Southern ministers and Northern missionaries, like the priests and vicars and whatnot who dealt with newly captured slaves, probably contented themselves with reading to the slaves the passages from the First Epistle of Paul (alias Saul the Enforcer) to Timothy, in which the Saint exhorts “as many servants as are under the yoke” to “count their own masters worthy of all honour, that the name of God and His doctrine be not blasphemed,” a prescription he repeated in letters to Titus (“Exhort servants to be obedient unto their own masters, and to please them well in all things”) and to the Church at Ephesus (“Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ”). Probably, too, the masters made sure the slaves heard the exhortation of Peter, in which the Rock upon which Jesus, for want of better foundation, was forced to build His Church extended the doctrine of obedience to unkind masters (“Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward”).
But even if there were ulterior motives, the fact remains: Africans were introduced to Christianity. And they embraced it. As to what the attraction of it could have been, one can only speculate. Perhaps it was that the notion of bodily dissolution was quite welcome to someone whose physical being was a mass of scars, sores, broken bones, empty guts, rheumy eyes, and the like. Or perhaps it was the belief that the European God must be greater than the African Great Sky God and his lesser companions, since otherwise how was it that only Africans were slaves? Or perhaps it was the idea that after all the suffering was over one went off to heavenly rest (probably being admitted through a side door), while those who caused the suffering were exquisitely tormented by a God so wise as to reserve the ultimate pleasure of vengeance for Himself. At any rate, they embraced Christianity and, consequently, became if not docile then more or less resigned. That they did so can be clearly seen in the negative example of the western end of the island of Hispaniola (what is now called Haiti), where the unenthusiastic efforts of a corrupt clergy allowed υaudou (or voodoo), an essentially African religion, to flourish, with the result that after a bloody revolution which cost the lives of most of the whites and a third to half of the blacks, France lost her most profitable colony and the world acquired its first black nation.
But while the Africans accepted Christianity, they did so only gradually, and never completely. Certain central Christian notions, while apparently adopted, retained a distinctly African character. While it was accepted, for example, that the deceased no longer were in contact with the living, they were still believed to be living—they had simply “gone home to Guinea.” (This, of course, explains the often reported “slave suicide” phenomenon, in which transportees would seemingly add to their misery by refusing such food or medicine as was offered, thereby ensuring their demise, or would actively pursue such demise by jumping overboard if the opportunity to do so presented itself. Nor was this kind of thing a matter of individual despair; the suicide attempts were often mass acts. One captain recorded an attempt that involved nearly a hundred men. The attempt did not follow a fit of despondency, but rather what the captain referred to as “a great deal of Discontent.”) In some cases (Haiti being the most celebrated, but Trinidad being equally clear), the African beliefs proved so powerful that the structure of entire Christian sects (Catholic in the case of Haiti, Catholic and Baptist in the case of Trinidad) was bent to an essentially African form. In fact, it is possible that, had slavery been restricted to the islands of the Caribbean, on which the social structure was based upon European notions of class (masters were masters because they were members of a master class, not because they were members of the European race), the advent of abolition would have found all ex-slaves equipped with a religion that provided a model for sane rationalization of the realities of Africa with the realities of an essentially European New World. But slavery was not so restricted. It existed in a nation which held as its basic tenet the notion that class distinctions are not only false but morally wrong. Thus masters were masters because they were racially European, and it followed that any smart African who was dissatisfied with wearing a collar could aspire to change his lot by becoming like them. This was not as difficult as it may seem, since the Europeans had shown a certain willingness to mingle their blood with that of Africans, and had established the practice of assigning slaves having greater percentages of European blood to favored positions in the house (and, some centuries later, in the Senate), while the legal system actually stipulated that a person could have a certain percentage of African blood and still be considered a member of the master race—as much as one eighth, in the case of Virginia. So there was hope for upward mobility through miscegenation, the visible evidence being a light skin. But no matter how light a man’s skin, nobody—not white people and not black people, either—was going to believe he was a European so long as he went around shouting like an African in church, drawing funny pictures on the floor, and declining to believe in heaven, hell, the vengeance of the Lord, et cetera and so forth. The result was logical: smart Africans stopped being Africans in any way they could. They suppressed and repressed, on their own account, things African. They branded those who clung to Africanisms as stupid—and in some senses they were right: if one’s freedom lies in being a European, one is stupid to read the future in chicken bones.
When Abolition came (as a by-product of a totally unrelated economic and political conflict), de jure slavery was replaced by de facto oppression (which later became a matter of law as well), but the basis of it was still race, and the smart Africans made use of their newfound freedom to pursue the physical and cultural appearance of the Europeans at every opportunity. The brightest (double entendre intended) of them revered “good hair” (and straightened theirs if they had to), respected education (to the point where any fool who could wear a suit and preach a sermon was called “doctor”—later, this applied to basketball players—and every piano player was a “professor”), pursued “society” (with elaborate cotillions in which the daughters of morticians, ministers, dentists, postal workers—essentially of middle-class families—impersonated French aristocracy and became debutantes for a day before taking jobs as typists), and, in their religion, emphasized pomp and circumstance to the point where a high-toned black congregation looked like an Anglican minstrel show. It was all useless, of course: the Europeans (now Americans) did not care if a black man was called colored, or negro (pronounced knee-grow), Negro (in 1931 The New York Times decided that the term should be capitalized), or Afro-American; they still regarded him as a spook, spade, smoke, jiggaboo, spearchucker, darky, or dinge—polite people never said nigger, except in anger.
Now, niggers aren’t stupid. When it became apparent that there was no chance for them to be Europeans, they looked around for the little pieces of Africa they had lost along the way. They brought their hog maws and pigs’ feet and watermelon out of the closet, and agitated for courses and whole academic departments to help them acquire a knowledge of their heritage. This, too, is useless; a heritage is something you believe in. One cannot become a believer by knowing facts or even by changing one’s name, wearing a dashiki, and making a pilgrimage to the Guinea Coast.
Which is not to say that Africa is lost to us—it is not. It cannot be. The Africanisms—the anthropologists aptly call them “survivals”—exist in all of us, independent of our knowledge or our volition. Those of us who have learned about them can recognize them in our own behavior; those of us who were raised under conditio
ns that reinforced the behavior can see it in everything we do. Those of us who know less about Africa than did the European slavers nevertheless tell tales that echo African tales, and sing songs that call on African patterns; nobody may know that the form is called “call and response,” but that’s the way you sing a song. And no matter how light-skinned and Episcopalian a black person is, he or she will never tell you that a person has died. “Passed away,” perhaps. Or “gone home.” But never died.
Now, many a liberal white has called all this a fortunate thing. Lucky niggers, heirs to two different cultural traditions. One such gentleman went so far as to suggest that a knowledge of the African past would make all the darkies happy and free and sure about their future. This is simplistic, romantic, half-witted drivel (the gentleman was not, of course, a historian). Because what it all means is that those of us who count black people among our ancestors (they are never all our ancestors) must live forever with both our knowledge and our belief. It is not that we must choose between traditions—that has been tried, and the attempt ended in failure. It is not even that we are caught in some dialectical battle between African thesis and European antithesis—then at least we could hope for the eventual synthesis. No, the quandary is that there is no comfort for us either way. For if European knowledge is true, then death is cold and final, and one set of our ancestors had their very existence whipped and chained and raped and starved away, while the other set—a larger proportion than any of us would like to admit—forever burns in hell for having done it to them. And if the African belief is true, then somewhere here with us, in the very air we breathe, all that whipping and chaining and raping and starving and branding and maiming and castrating and lynching and murdering—all of it—is still going on.
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