Sacred Hunger (36 page)

She set down the dishes on the table, straightened herself and stood still for some moments, though without looking directly at Owen.

“Do you think I don’t know where you have been?”’

Owen said. “She pretends not to understand anything,” he added to Paris. “Me go call Mandingo priest-man,” he said loudly. “He catchee thief. Tomorrow—do you hear that?”’

The woman glanced indifferently at him then turned and walked slowly out of the room.

“She has been plotting with her relatives,”

Owen said. “But I have given her something to think about now. Serve yourself, sir. Let us not stand on ceremony.”

Paris took boiled fowl and rice and a sauce of palm oil and chopped peppers. Small black flies had entered the room; he felt the occasional sting through his shirt. Glancing up, he found Owen’s eyes on him in a wide, unsteady stare.

“The Mandingos have a fashion of finding things out,” the factor said. “I did not believe it when I came here at first, but I have seen things with my own eyes… They follow the law of Mahomit according to the Alchorn, as they learn it from the Moors of Barbary and elsewhere, and so fetches it down here by these wandering pilgrims. You may say it is not reasonable for a Christian man to believe they are able to perform anything above the common run. But I have seen them with nothing but a few feathers and a handful of sand find out the secrets of futurity and things that people have spoke of to no one. It is my belief they have the power of some evil spirit or familiar sent to them by the great enemy, to draw these ignorant Bulums to himself.”

The rum he had drunk, the wavering light, his host’s oddly disconnected speech, had combined to confuse Paris. It seemed to him for a moment that the factor was referring to some powerful and malignant slave trader further in the interior. ‘Who is that?”’ he said. “Further upriver, is he?”’

“I am talking about Satan.” Owen looked gloomily before him. His mood was turning morose.

He had eaten very little and now thrust his plate aside and reached again for the bottle. ‘It is by Satan’s help these ignorant wretches are so deceived,” he said.

“The Bulum compose the local population, don’t they? Is the woman… your housekeeper, is she a Bulum?”’

“No, she belongs to the Kru people.”

“They are darker, aren’t they? Yellow Henry and his band are Bulum, I suppose. Well, he is a mulatto of course, but -“

“You were acquainted with Henry Cook then?”’

“It was he who came with our first slaves.”

“He’ll never come with another.” Owen clapped white, slender hands at a fly, looking afterwards with a sort of hallucinated intensity for traces on his palms.

“Why? What do you mean?”’

But the factor had reverted to his former gloomy staring and made no reply. He remained silent for some considerable time with his head sunk on his chest.

Paris was beginning to think he had gone to sleep when he spoke again, in the blurred and dogged fashion of a man contending with his own obscured senses to reach to the heart of truth. “No,” he said, “for all religion these Bulums have only the Porra Man.”

“Who is he?”’

“There is a secret mystery that these people have kept for many ages, or for all we know since their first foundation. It goes by the name of Porra or Porra Men. These men are marked in their infancy by the priests with three or four rows of small dents upon their backs and shoulders. Anyone that has not these marks they look on as of no account. There is one among the rest who personates the devil or Porra. He hides himself in some convenient place within call and upon his priests shouting he in the bush answers it with a terrible screech. Wherever the women or white men or any that is not Porra hear it, they fly immediately to their houses and shut all the windows and doors. Any caught outside will be torn to pieces.”

Owen raised his head and fixed the surgeon with a sombre regard. “I have heard them,” he said.

“I have heard the screams. Sounds carry in this place. The Porra hasn’t come this far yet, though.” He attempted a derisive expression, but there was no change in his eyes. “It is all nonsense anyway, no one but a savage could believe in it. They come into town afterwards, this mock devil with his gang about him, and he speaks through a reed, and he tells on what account he comes and demands liquor and victuals. Then he goes away with singing and dancing and all is quiet again.

‘Tis all faking—anyone with the curiosity to peer out of their houses would see it was only a man dressed up.”

“They surely cannot lack for curiosity to that extent,” Paris said. “Either they are too terrified to look out or —and this I think more probable—they accept the mummery for the sake of order, just as we do. You say these people are charlatans. Well, just look at England, she is a paradise for Porra Men: the Church and the learned professions and parliament are full of them.”

He hesitated here, with some feeling of compunction.

Owen’s eyes were mournful and moist—he had wanted only to confide his solitude, his fears of the dark. But the surgeon was a little drunk and the memory of his shame was hot in his mind and his old vice of prideful assertiveness had him now in its grip.

“The system works better here,” he said. “It has great consequence for the peace of the country. In Liverpool, not long before I left, a gang of seamen started to break up a brothel where one of them had been robbed. Others joined in. The watch was powerless to do anything. In the end they had to call in a regiment of militia and read the riot act. Two seamen and a passer-by were killed outright and one of the girls crippled for life before they could restore order.”

Paris paused, smiling his bitter, lop-sided smile. He was arrogant with superior wisdom and intensely dislikeable at this moment. “If it had happened here,” he said, “just one screech from the bushes would have solved all.”

“Are you comparing things at home to this benighted place? I see you are one of those who always think they know better.” Owen raised his head to look steadily at Paris. Anger had stiffened him, given clarity to his speech. “You do not know better, sir. You do not know worse, even. You know nothing at all of the nature of life here, along this pestilential river.”

There was silence between them for a short while. Paris sat with shoulders bowed, his big-knuckled hands thrust between his knees as if for safekeeping. Then he looked squarely into the other man’s face. “You are right,” he said, “and I am sorry that I spoke as I did.” Rage to have the better of it, unwillingness to compromise, these were old failings in him, if failings they be. New, however—no older than Ruth’s death—was the swift remorse that would come to him, a feeling like sorrow, at having delivered a wound for the mere sake of argument. The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now than another aspect of that ancient urge—much older than the desire for truth—to command attention, dominate one’s fellows. The fuddled man before him was truth enough. He had belittled the nature of the factor’s servitude. Owen needed to despise his surroundings in order to endure them. That a man engaged in this cruel trade still deserved not to be treated with cruelty seemed a mystery to Paris rather than a truth; but it was one which contained a strong imperative for him. “Why don’t you get out?”’ he said gently. “Why don’t you leave this place?”’

“Get out?”’ Owen laughed on a rising note.

“Where to? All my capital is sunk here. I cannot return a pauper, they do not welcome prodigal sons. No, I am caught here, seven degrees above the line, three thousand miles from my native seat.” He laughed again briefly and licked slowly and carefully round his mouth. “I am hoping for an upturn in trade,” he said in low tones. ‘Before the Porra Man gets me, eh, Mr Paris?”’

It was Paris’s private view that fever and rum would find Owen first; but he was relieved to see the expression of weak jocularity that had come now to his host’s face. “I was something of a Porra Man myself, in England,” he said, not knowing quite what he meant, wanting to keep Owen in this lighter mood.

In this he succeeded. The factor had come round full circle and was disposed to sodden laughter now.

The notion of this rather gangling, crease-faced guest of his lurking and screeching was one he found very risible.

And it was on this note of mirth and restored amity that the two men parted for the night, Owen unsteadily to his bedroom, where the Kru woman had lain asleep some hours already, Paris to the small guest room at the end of the house, with its bunk bed and net canopy and its own door on to the verandah.

Here he lay for a long time sleepless, in spite of the drink, thinking of the diseased slave woman and the voracious, mud-coloured crabs creeping up from the river, and of the extraordinary ramifications of this trade in human creatures. Fumbling in his mind for some grasp of the complex chain of transactions between the capture of a negro and the purchase of a new cravat by Erasums Kemp, his cousin, or the giving of a supper party by his uncle, he thought he heard again that distant pattering sound of surf or drums. There were occasional cries of night birds. Some time during the night he thought he heard the mutter of voices and afterwards groans that might have been caused by love or nightmare. Finally he fell into a troubled sleep, only to be brought awake again, not much after dawn, by the need to void his bladder.

He dressed and passed out on to the verandah and from there to the side of the house that was nearest to him. There was a chill in the air but no breath of wind. A thin mist lay over the compound and the shrub beyond it. There were sleeping forms under brightly coloured blankets in the lean-to where the woman had sat winding her thread.

Paris passed behind the house, avoided approaching too near the barracoon, which was silent and partly shrouded in mist, and urinated against the far side of a low shed near the edge of the clearing. In the immediate, mildly scalding pleasure of the discharge, he noticed nothing; but as he buttoned himself and prepared to return he became aware of a smell of animal decomposition, cold, dank, quite unmistakable.

It did not come, as he thought at first, from within the forest, but from immediately before him, from inside the shed. He hesitated briefly then advanced his face to peer through the splintered plank. In rapid review, in the seconds before recoil, he saw three naked bodies, bloodstreaked and dreadfully staring, one bigger than the others, on its back, a big-featured face he knew, despite the blood-filled sockets where the eyes had been, a mounded belly the colour of dry clay, incongrously soft and smooth-looking, with a smear of red on it like a cattle brand. Flies had found them out, even thus early—he saw the gauzy glint of wings. One outflung hand had a thumb missing. He remembered the men who had held up their hands and grinned… As though reinforced by this recognition, the smell grew denser, sickening. Paris went back as though pursued across the clearing. He thought he heard a faint rattling from the barracoon. Glancing up he saw two vultures, heads settled on necks, asleep on the ridge-pole.

Later, at breakfast, he said nothing of his discovery to Owen, who was sick-looking and uncommunicative this morning, though he produced coffee for his guest from a carefully hoarded store, for which Paris was profoundly grateful. The Kru woman was nowhere to be seen.

‘Well,” Paris said, as one of his oarsmen pushed barefoot against the mooring post and the canoe edged out towards midstream, “I hope your Mandingo priest will get to the bottom of things.” It was the only hope he felt able to express for Owen. As the river began to curve away he turned to look back. The factor was still there, diminutive and lonely, standing on the bankside amidst the detritus of palm leaves and dead crabs, watching him out of sight. At the last moment Owen took off his hat and waved it once. Then the canoe took the bend and he was cancelled abruptly; the forested banks resumed their sway, concealing all traces. That scrape of human lodgement, focal point of wretchedness, the house, the compound, Owen with his longing for salad and polite manners, the shackled slaves in the stinking barracoon, no smallest hint of it remained.

The river was the only reality here. The river was the link of trade. Slaves came down from the upper reaches, perhaps hundreds of miles. The river bore them down to its bellowing mouth, the terrible ordeal of the surf, the open sky, the waiting ships. Wherever on this coast that there were rivers it would be the same. The rivers of Africa admitted the slavers to her vitals…

The long, light canoe was making good speed. The oarsmen set up a rhythmic cry as they thrust on the poles, perhaps in warning of their approach, as the channel was winding and the craft in midstream. But the men who were rowing him were so like those he had seen in the barracoon, in colour and in general cast of feature —he was beginning to notice such things now comt this wild cry of theirs seemed irresistibly to Paris like a cry of mourning for those in chains, who were too lost to mourn for themselves.

When Paris got down as far as Tucker’s he found the yawl ready to leave, with only Thurso waited for. The slaves lay bound amidships, crowded promiscuously together. Sitting apart was a slightly built, smiling African in cotton singlet and drawers. This was the newly hired linguister, Simmonds told him—a protege of Tucker’s. Simmonds did not look well, he noticed: the mate’s eyes were heavy-lidded and he held his head as if movement gave him pain there.

Thurso came down to the landing stage with the dignified and gravely smiling Tucker by his side. After they had exchanged civilities and assurances of further trade, the yawl was cast off.

The wind was up and there was a heavy sea over the river mouth, obliging them to make a wide tack westward so as to get more easily over the bar.

Back on board they found the carpenter, with four men to assist him, busy constructing a barricade of stakes across the fore part of the quarterdeck, lashing the upright stanchions to long horizontals of inch-thick board that extended from side to side, with gates above the companion ladders. The starboard side was already complete; Johnson and Libby had run the swivel cannon out of its port so as to turn the muzzle through the fence, down on to the slave deck below.