Drum (5 page)

But morning did not find them at the sea. The next morning they were still on the river and the next and the next, until eight mornings had passed with only a short rest each day when they were unchained and allowed to get out of the canoe so they might walk the kinks out of their cramped muscles on some sandy riverbank, and eat, drink and relieve themselves.

chapter iv

Don Fernando Francisco Bernardo de Llarinago y Tatt,

better known as Mongo Don from Accra to Calabar along the Gold Coast and even as far down south in Africa as Loanda, slowly opened his eyes and shuddered. Mongo Don hated everything along the Gold Coast with the possible exception of the good solid pounds sterling it had enabled him to pile up to his credit in the offices of Tait & Llarinago, Factors, of Liverpool. But most of all, upon awakening, he hated himself with a bitter, nameless loathing that encompassed everything he had ever done or touched. He looked with disgust at the gray cotton sheet—grayed not because it was unclean, but because of the continued washings in the water of the Niger; at the unkempt bed; the hard-packed dirt floor which, no matter how often it was swept, looked exactly like what it was—dirt. Even more contemptible was the sweaty form of the Negro wench, sleeping soundly beside him, her breath still reeking of rum, her tight black cap ot wiry wool peppercomed into little mounds, a drool of saliva hanging from her thick lips and her skin almost livid in the morning Ught. His own aging body, with the long gray hairs plastered with sweat to his bony chest, and his whole emaciated frame were equally repulsive to him. With supreme disgust, he edged away from the sweating black curves so closely plastered against him, to allow a passage of air between his own sticky body and that of the woman. She grunted like an animal disturbed in its rest and shifted her body so that her back was to him. He cursed her silently and then, unable to stomach any longer the impassive sleep of his companion, drew up his knees and placed his bunioned and misshapen feet with their long yellow nails against the middle of her back and pushed.

She slid from the bed and landed on the floor with a dull thud like a sack of grain but the scream that rent the air was high-pitched and was immediately followed by a string oi

curses, rich in the raany-voweled syllables of Hausa. Still dazed, she hoisted herself to her knees, rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands and began a lower-keyed howling which further served to tauten Mongo Don's already strained nerves.

"You no love-a Jobeena more?" she wailed.

"Shut your blabbering mouth and get out, you black she-elephant." He pointed to the doorway. "Out! Do you hear me?" He half rose in bed and threatened her with a weakly clenched fist. "Out, or by every dirty heathen god from here to Ethiopia, I'll flatten your goddam nose even flatter than it is now." His cursing was in cultured English, betrayed only by a lisping Spanish accent.

Jobeena stopped her howling, cutting it off abruptly on the rising crescendo of one final shriek, reached down to pick up a shapeless mass of once-red cloth, now faded to a dirty pink, and slipped it over her head. The garment fitted itself snugly to the full, voluptuous curves of her body but it could not hide the coarseness of her face, the cropped hair, the ^reading nostrils and the thick lips. Her skin lost its gray-ness as the full light of the sun hit it through the half-open shutters, making it gleam in stripes of browTi and black.

Jobeena scratched under her arms as she regarded the unhealthy whiteness and blotched redness of Mongo Don's body on the bed. "I go, Masta Mongo," she said. There was an iqual contempt in her voice. She had a lover among the dave guards and much preferred the violent thrusting of her Negro to the weak efforts of this old man. But her compliance o the white man meant money. Her black man could pay her jnly in pleasure.

"Yes, get out." Mongo Don felt he could not look at her mother moment. "And don't come back tonight, at least not if that covenanting Scot arrives for his cargo. Stay away intil he gets t'hell out of here. I've no mind for a lecture on linnin', fornicatin' and adulterin'.' "

'Yes, Masta Mongo, I don' come back while he's here." 'And tell Blackanna to send me a cup of coffee and some -read and tell her to fetch Mister Jonathan."

"Yes, Masta Mongo."

"And now, get moving!" He waited impatiently for her D leave and close the door behind her, then started to scratch JS legs, covered with the dry red scabs of some tropical ongus.

Dammit! He wished he were back in Havana. He was fed

up with Africa and rum and black wenches and slave trading worn out with carrying the whole responsibility of the fac tory on his shoulders. What did he have Jonathan out her for? How could the young squirt learn the business if h never knew what to do without being told? But no, Jonathai was a good lad and learning fast. Akeady he had relievei him of much of the work. By the bleeding wounds of Chrisl he was sick of it all! His mind stretched ahead to som future morning in Havana when he could wake up in civilized bed in a civilized room beside a civilized whit woman—or at least an octoroon—who didn't smeU of vege table butter and sweat. They could eat a civilized breakfas together and then he would leave her and devote the rest o his day to his painting. Absently he scratched at the re< incrustations on his legs until the blood came.

Dammit! He'd never last another year in this hell-hole Fever and scabs and wasting away! Rum and slaves and hag gling slave captains! Arabs and more slaves and mor haggling! Heat and malaria and dirt, no matter how hard on tried to keep the place clean. And now, on top of all thes other things, a day's work ahead of him. The Augustus Ta was due to anchor in a day or two and that Bible-shoutin Captain MacPherson would soon be coming ashore in hi long boat, preaching out of his mouth one minute and fingei ing the wenches all over the next. Wanted to see if they wer fit! Wanted to see if they were virgins! Ay, la virgL sanctissima, the only virgins they ever had were those unde ten years old and one couldn't be too goddam sure aboi: them, either. The Uttle sluts started spreading their legs bac in their native villages when they were about twelve and afte that not a one of them could pass any virginity test. All th Captain wanted was an excuse to finger them. Oh, to he with it all! And to make matters worse, runners had com the night before from Ama-jallah, that goddamned Ara princeling. He would arrive today, expecting to be kowtowe to like the King of Spain.

Ama-jallah, the half-breed son of the Sultan of Zindei Sultan of Shit! Half Arab and half Negro, living in a mu palace and calling himself a Sultan. And his high-nosed so with all his affectations of elegance—his embroidered sli{ pers, his robes of white muslin and his strings of pearl; Bah! The bastard—and he probably was a bastard—wouldn know an El Greco from a Velasquez!

Velasquez, El Greco, Goya! Boucher, Fragonard, Largi

liere! How Mongo Don loved the names and the great paintings they stood for. He looked at the half-finished canvas propped up on an easel in the comer. Yes, he hated that too. How could a man paint a white woman when he had not seen one in seven years? Velasquez? Bah, he couldn't have painted one either. Seven years of thick lips and wide nostrils and hair like wool! What was that verse his English mother had taught him?—"Bah, bah, black sheep, have you any wool?"

No need to ask the stinking blacks that question. All they had was wool—wiry, close-cropped and rough. Nothing a man could run his hands through and let cascade through his fingers like strands of silk; nothing he could sink his face into and smell the faint and indescribably delicious aroma that exists only in the beloved's hair. Wiry wool and stinking armpits. Mongo Don shuddered. How he hated Africa. And yet, did he? Africa had eluded him, escaped him. There was something grand and wonderful, something regal and majestic about Africa but he had never been able to find it. There was strength and beauty if he could just glimpse it, if he could....

He was daydreaming again and there was work to do. Get

the guest house ready for Ama-jallah! Probably the bastard

:had the same kind of kinky wool on his head but he knew

iTsnough to keep it covered with a turban of white muslin. Oh

iwelll What was it he had to do? Get the guest house ready;

^oave it swept and garnished. Spread the divan with new

cloths. Take down the rotting curtains and put up new ones.

3o to the warehouse and pick out the blasted presents that

royalty—black-blooded and black-skinned royalty—expected.

dut wait. . . . Jonathan would do that. Jonathan knew

anough now to take over the chores and let his uncle relax.

lelax! He knew what would relax him. If he could paint

jne picture, just one picture, and feel that he had put a soul

Qto it, he would be happy.

Mongo Don shifted his long, lean shanks over the edge of me bed, groped under it with one hand for the porcelain 4iamber pot and sat on the very edge of the thin mattress, fitting the slow stream trickle down. He sighed and shook lis head. He'd like a bath but he didn't have time. He needed I shave but that would come later. The gray bristle of his •card scratched his hand as he rubbed his face and he won-tted if it had scratched Jobeena's smooth skin last night. He oped it had. From the wardrobe he pulled out a pair of

clean pantaloons which, like the sheets, had once been white but were now a dusty gray, slipped them on, and put his feet into thonged sandals. There was a rap at the door.

"Come in," he called, lifting his arms to his shirtsleeves.

The door swung open slowly, propelled by the black foot of a naked Negro urchin. He bore a tray covered with a grayed white napkin, which was immediately whisked out of his hand by the man behind him. A playful slap on the fal Uttle rump of the boy sent him scampering away.

"Time you were here, Jonathan," Mongo Don grumbled. "There's a lot of work to be done today."

"Already started, sir." Jonathan Danson was the exact opposite of Mongo Don. Where the Mongo was old and ravaged by his years on the Gold Coast, Jonathan was yoimg and pinkly fresh as though he had stepped out of a Devonshire cottage on a misty October morning. One could never imagine there was any blood relationship between the two, but Jonathan was Mongo Don's great-nephew, fresh out of the Liverpool countinghouse which owned and controlled the slave factory here at Yendo Castle in the Niger Delta. Mongo Doc represented the Spanish side of the family which, in the previous generation, had married with the English to founc the Llarinago-Tait djmasty. Now they owned not only the vast warehouses, piers and offices in Liverpool and Havanj but three factories on the Gold Coast of which Yendo Castle; was the largest, as well as the fleet of sturdy slavers whict plied back and forth across the Atlantic. From Liverpool they came to Africa, loaded with gaudily printed cottons copper kettles, iron pans, bugle beads, cheap mirrors and al] the other claptrap of trade goods. Then back across the Middle Passage to Cuba, loaded with their most precious cargc —slaves—and carrying also ivory, wax, oil and gold. Once they had discharged their living cargo in Havana, they filled with tobacco, rum, sugar and rare Cuban woods for the return journey to Liverpool. There was a cargo waiting ir every port and a ready profit from each one but the biggest profit of all was from the black sons and daughters of Africa whose seed would soon spread across all the new world.

"Already started, sir," Jonathan repeated so cheerfull> that it made Mongo Don wince just to look at him. "The compound's been swept, the guest house cleaned—"

"New curtains?" Mongo Don raised his head, hoping thai this particular item might have been missed.

"New curtains that will knock Ama-jallah's eyes out. Spe-

cial chair set up for His Highness on the porch alongside yours and gifts lined up for his inspection."

"What gifts?"

Jonathan ticked them off on his fingers. "One brass clock, one crystal chandelier with a hundred wax candles—"

"Change them to tallow, the stinking Sultan will never know the difference."

"Yes, sir," Jonathan nodded, "and one bolt of rose damask—"

"Silk or cotton?" Mongo Don was hoping to catch the boy in some error.

"Silk on a cotton warp, sir, but it looks like silk." He waited for Mongo Don to nod his head in approval before he continued. 'Twelve bottles of assorted French scent and twelve cases of Cuban mm."

Mongo Don spat on the floor. "The bastards say their religion prohibits them from touching Uquor, but I notice they always lap it up."

"The Sultan of Zinder finds it a powerful medicine," Jonathan winked, "and twelve Sheffield spoons, a brass crown with glass jewels and three second-hand French court gowns."

"For Ama-jallah's three wives. What if he has a fourth by : now?"

"We've others in the storehouse."

Mongo Don sipped his coffee and broke the hot bread into [Chunks, which he dipped into the strong brew and then i sucked into his mouth. He was unable to chew with his stubble of broken teeth.

"And food for the caravan?"

*Ten goats slaughtered and hung for the slaves. Three sheep for Ama-jaUah's cous-cous." He stopped suddenly.

Mongo Don held up a warning finger for silence.

"Hark! Can it be the bastard's coming now?"

"Either that, sir, or all hell's broke loose on the river, listenl" Jonathan cupped his hand to his ear and his foot instinctively started tapping to the beat of the drum which set ithe stroke for the first canoe. A volley of shots was fired, causing all the pigeons in the compound to take flight, followed by another that started them off as soon as they had settled. There was a loud banging of kettles, accompanied by bursts of song from the Krus and even a chorus of feeble shouts from the canoe loads of slaves, who had sensed they were nearing their final destination.

The noise of the arrival had aroused the whole of Yendo

Castle, free and slave, village and factory. Although the arrival of a slave caravan from the interior was not as exciting as a ship from overseas, it meant a break in the monotony of the lives of the factory slaves and the villagers. Their bare feet could be heard padding across the compound, and by the time Mongo Don and Jonathan had arrived at the landing stage there were perhaps a hundred people crowded around and onto the jerry-built bamboo piers that straggled out into the river.