American Gods (42 page)

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain
upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth,
safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real
pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these
other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop
before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the
tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

And the simple truth is this: There was a girl and her uncle
sold her.

This is what they used to say, where the girl came from: no
man may be certain who fathered a child, but the mother, ah, that you could be
certain of. Lineage and property was something that moved in the matrilineal
line, but power remained in the hands of the men: a man had complete ownership
of his sister’s children.

There was a war in that place, and it was a small war, no
more than a skirmish between the men oftwo rival villages. It was almost an
argument. One village won the argument, one village lost it.

Life as a commodity, people as possessions. Enslavement had
been part of the culture of those parts for thousands of years. The Arab
slavers had destroyed the last of the great kingdoms of East Africa, while me
West African nations had destroyed each other.

There was nothing untoward or unusual about their uncle selling
the twins, although twins were considered magical beings, and their uncle was
scared of them, scared enough that he did not tell them that they were to be
sold in case they harmed his shadow and killed him. They were twelve years old.
She was called Wututu, the messenger bird, he was called Agasu, the name of a
dead king. They were healthy children, and, because they were twins, male and female,
they were told many things about the gods, and because they were twins they
listened to the things that they were told, and they remembered.

Their uncle was a fat and lazy man. If he had owned more cattle,
perhaps he would have given up one of his cattle instead of the children, but
he did not. He sold the twins. Enough of him: he shall not enter further into
this narrative. We follow the twins.

They were marched, with several other slaves taken or sold
in the war, for a dozen miles to a small outpost. Here they were traded, and
the twins, along with thirteen others, were bought by six men with spears and
knives who marched them to the west, toward the sea, and then for many miles
along the coast. There were fifteen slaves now altogether, their hands loosely
bound, tied neck to neck.

Wututu asked her brother Agasu what would happen to them.

“I do not know,” he said. Agasu was a boy who smiled often:
his teeth were white and perfect, and he showed them as he grinned, his happy
smiles making Wututu happy in her turn. He was not smiling now. Instead he
tried to show bravery for his sister, his head back and shoulders spread, as
proud, as menacing, as comical as a puppy with its hackles raised.

The man in the line behind Wututu, his cheeks scarred, said,
“They will sell us to the white devils, who will take us to their home across
the water.”

“And what will they do to us there?” demanded Wututu.

The man said nothing.

“Well?” asked Wututu. Agasu tried to dart a glance over his
shoulder. They were not allowed to talk or sing as they walked.

“It is possible they will eat us,” said the man. “That is
what I have been told. That is why they need so many slaves. It is because they
are always hungry.”

Wututu began to cry as she walked. Agasu said, “Do not cry,
my sister. They will not eat you. I shall protect you. Our gods will protect
you.”

But Wututu continued to cry, walking with a heavy heart, feeling
pain and anger and fear as only a child can feel it: raw and overwhelming. She
was unable to tell Agasu that she was not worried about the white devils eating
her. She would survive, she was certain of it. She cried because she was scared
that they would” eat her brother, and she was not certain that she could
protect him.

They reached a trading post, and they were kept there for
ten days. On the morning of the tenth day they were taken from the hut in which
they had been imprisoned (it had become very crowded in the final days, as men arrived
from far away bringing their own strings and skeins of slaves). They were
marched to the harbor, and Wututu saw the ship that was to take them away.

Her first thought was how big a ship it was, her second that
it was too small for all of them to fit inside. It sat lightly on the water.
The ship’s boat came back and forth, ferrying the captives to the ship, where
they Were manacled and arranged in low decks by sailors, some of whom were
brick red or tan-skinned, with strange pointy nOses and beards that made them
look like beasts. Several of the sailors looked like her own people, like the
men who had marched her to the coast. The men and the worneM and the children
were separated, forced into different areas on the slave deck. There were too
many slaves for the ship to hold easily, so another dozen men were chained up
on the deck in the open, beneath the places where the crew would sling their
hammocks.

Wututu was put in with the children, not with the women; and
she was not chained, merely locked in. Agasu, her brother, was forced in with
the men, in chains, packed like herrings. It stank under that deck, although
the crew had scrubbed it down since their last cargo. It was a stink that had
entered the wood: the smell of fear and bile and diarrhea and death, of fever
and madness and hate. Wututu sat in the hot hold with the other children. She
could feel the children on each side of her sweating. A wave tumbled a small
boy into her, hard, and he apologized in a tongue that Wututu did not
recognize. She tried to smile at him in the semidarkness.

The ship set sail. Now it rode heavy in the water.

Wututu wondered about the place the white men came from
(although none of them was truly white: sea-burned and sunburned they were, and
their skins were dark). Were they so short of food that they had to send all
the way to her land for people to eat? Or was it that she was to be a delicacy,
a rare treat for a people who had eaten so many things that only black-skinned
flesh in their cookpots made their mouths water?

On the second day out of port the ship hit a squall, not a
bad one, but the ship’s decks lurched and tumbled, and the smell of vomit
joined the mixed smells of urine and liquid feces and fear-sweat. Rain poured
down on them in bucket-loads from the air gratings set in the ceiling of the
slave deck.

A week into the voyage, and well out of sight of land, the
slaves were allowed out of irons. They were warned that any disobedience, any
trouble, and they would be punished more than they had ever imagined.

In the morning the captives were fed beans and ship’s
biscuits, and a mouthful each of vinegared lime juice, harsh enough that their
faces would twist, and they would cough and splutter, and some of them would
moan and wail as the lime juice was spooned out. They could not spit it out,
though: if they were caught spitting or dribbling it out they were lashed or
beaten.

The night brought them salted beef. It tasted unpleasant,
and there was a rainbow sheen to the gray surface of the meat. That was at the
start of the voyage. As the voyage continued, the meat grew worse.

When they could, Wututu and Agasu would huddle together,
talking of their mother and their home and their playfellows. Sometimes Wututu
would tell Agasu the stories their mother had told them, like those of Elegba,
the trickiest of the gods, who was Great Mawu’s eyes and ears in the world, who
took messages to Mawu and brought back Mawu’s replies.

In the evenings, to while away the monotony of the voyage,
the sailors would make the slaves sing for them and dance the dances of their
native lands.

Wututu was lucky that she had been put in with the children.
The children-were packed in tightly and ignored; the women were not always so
fortunate. On some slave ships the female slaves were raped repeatedly by the
crew, simply as an unspoken perquisite of the voyage. This was not one of those
ships, which is not to say that there were no rapes.

A hundred men, women, and children died on that voyage and
were dropped over the side; and some of the captives who were dropped over the
side had not yeit died, but the green chill of the ocean cooled their final
fevgr and they went down flailing, choking, lost.

Wututu and Agasu were traveling on a’Dutch ship, but they
did not know this, and it might as eajily have been British, or Portuguese, or
Spanish, or French.

The black crewmen on the ship, their skins even darker than
Wututu’s, told the captives where to go, what to do, when to dance. One morning
Wututu caught one of the black guards staring at her. When she was eating, the
man came over to her and stared down at her, without saying anything.

“Why do you do this?” she asked the man. “Why do you serve
the white devils?”

He grinned at her as if her question was the funniest thing
he had ever heard. Then he leaned over, so his lips were almost brushing her
ears, so his hot breath on her ear made her suddenly feel sick. “If you were
older,” he told her, “I would make you scream with happiness from my penis.
Perhaps I will do it tonight. I have seen how well you dance.”

She looked at him with her nut-brown eyes and she said, unflinching,
smiling even, “If you put it in me down there I will bite it off with my teeth
down there. I am a witch girl, and I have very sharp teeth down there.” She
took pleasure in watching his expression change. He said nothing and walked
away.

The words had come out of her mouth, but they had not been
her words: she had not thought them or made them. No, she realized, those were
the words of Elegba the trickster. Mawu had made the world and then, thanks to
Elegba’s trickery, had lost interest in it. It was Elegba of the clever ways
and the iron-hard erection who had spoken through her, who had ridden her for a
moment, and that night before she slept she gave thanks to Elegba.

Several of the captives refused to eat. They were whipped
until they put food into their mouths and swallowed, although the whipping was
severe enough that two men died of it. Still, no one else on the ship tried to
starve themselves to freedom. A man and a woman tried to kill themselves by
leaping over the side. The woman succeeded. The man was rescued and he was tied
to the mast and lashed for the better part of a day, until his back ran with
blood, and he was left there as the day became night. He was given no food to
eat, and nothing to drink but his own piss. By the third day he was raving, and
his head had swollen and grown soft, like an old melon. When he stopped raving
they threw him over the side. Also, for five days following the escape attempt
the captives were returned to then—manacles and chains.

It was a long journey and a bad one for the captives, and it
was not pleasant for the crew, although they had learned to harden their hearts
to the business, and pretended to themselves that they were no more than farmers,
taking their livestock to the market.

They made harbor on a pleasant, balmy day in Bridgeport,
Barbados, and the captives were carried from the ship to the shore in low boats
sent out from the dock, and taken to the market square where they were, by dint
of a certain amount of shouting, and blows from cudgels, arranged into lines. A
whistle blew, and the market square filled with men: poking, prodding,
red-faced men, snouting, inspecting, calling, appraising, grumbling.

Wututu and Agasu were separated then. It happened so fast—a
big man forced open Agasu’s mouth, looked at his teeth, felt his arm muscles,
nodded, and two other men hauled Agasu away. He did not fight them. He looked
at Wututu and called, “Be brave,” to her. She nodded, and then her vision
smeared and blurred with tears, and she wailed. Together they were twins,
magical, powerful. Apart they were two children in pain.

She never saw him again but once, and neverjn life.

This is what happened to Agasu. First theylook him to a seasoning
farm, where they whipped him daily for the things he did and didn’t do, they
taught him a smattering of English and they gave him the name of Inky Jack, for
the darkness of his skin. When he ran away they hunted him down with dogs and
brought him back, and cut off a toe with a chisel, to teach him a lesson he
would not forget. He would have starved himself to death, but when he refused
to eat his front teeth were broken and thin gruel was forced into his mouth,
until he had no choice but to swallow or to choke.

Even in those times they preferred slaves born into
captivity to those brought over from Africa. The free-born slaves tried to run,
or they tried to die, and either way, there went the profits.

When Inky Jack was sixteen he was sold, with several other
slaves, to a sugar plantation on the island of St. Domingue. They called him
Hyacinth, the big, broken-toothed slave. He met an old woman from his own
village on that plantation—she had been a house slave before her fingers became
too gnarled and arthritic—who toM him that the whites intentionally split up
captives from the same towns and villages and regions, to avoid insurrection
and revolts. They did not like it when slaves spoke to each other in their own
languages.

Hyacinth learned some French, and was taught a few of the
teachings of the Catholic Church. Each day he cut sugar-cane from well before
the sun rose until after the sun had set.

He fathered several children. He went with the other slaves,
in the small hours of the night, to the woods, although it was forbidden, to
dance the Calinda, to sing to Damballa-Wedo, the serpent god, in the form of a
black snake. He sang to Elegba, to Ogu, Shango, Zaka, and to many others, all
the gods the captives had brought with them to the island, brought in their minds
and their secret hearts.