The Prophets(102)
He wiped his saliva from the floor. In it, lumps of chewed tobacco that made him frown. He threw the rag into the fireplace, underneath the pot, into the ash. There was a stain on the floor where the spittoon had spilled. The brownness of its contents seeped into the wood grain. It would always be there now.
He patted the pocket of his overalls. There was still half a plug of tobacco left. He pulled it out of the pouch, broke off a piece, and shoved it into his mouth. He sat in the only chair in the room and stared at the dying light in the lantern: how it shrank and dimmed but still made the whole room jump, inhale and exhale in its light, casting shadowy auras around everything. It made him long for evenings on the London plains, as foggy as they were, but not for its people.
The promise of riches, he thought, was a damn lie. It had rendered his journey—his long, arduous journey on ships with gaunt, diseased men—a mockery. But he didn’t have the resources to return, not that things were much better in England. There, he would have the same sallow face and necessity for chewing tobacco. At least here his pockets were not as empty. But they were still not full enough, and that wasn’t what his cousin Paul had promised him.
Paul didn’t tell him how disagreeable this land would prove to be, how it would harden him further, that even his voice would change. No one told him that the women here would scoff at him and that, as a result, his beauty—the one thing he could count on across the sea—would fade from disuse. Paul had called him vain and he thought Paul gluttonous. Linked by sins, he realized that they were family not merely because the same blood ran through their veins, but because the same blood stained their hands.
James’s father died first; his mother, moaning and coughing up something dark, shortly afterward. He was four and he had not yet learned how to bathe himself. So when two tall men finally came to the broken-down house of festering and insects, claimed him, and brought him, on horse, to some place where the mist hid everything, they scrunched their noses, and James blended into the mass of messy-faced, disheveled orphans forever dressed in gray.
As he chewed on the tobacco, he thought, Dirty children should remain dirty for as long as they can. Clean ones attract too much attention. At the orphanage, busy hands were as much a workshop for the devil as idle ones. And because he was such a good student, he learned to do interesting things with his own. Picking locks and pockets, and sometimes women, was what he resigned himself to until he reached the age of nineteen and learned that his mother had a sister.
There was no other way across the ocean than to rent himself out to the slavers. He was astounded by how many niggers they managed to squeeze onto the ship. They were filed away in the hull like documents, carefully stacked upon one another, barely enough room to wiggle their toes. Hot and funky, they were jammed into the space, chained together in a prostrate position, weeping and moaning, praying in their gibberish languages, surely begging their black-ass godlings to grant them the gift of being able to stretch their arms and breathe.
Every day, James had the task of entering the space to feed them whatever slop was in the pot he was carrying. The food smelled almost as bad as the niggers. Each day, he entered and each day he left wishing he never had to see any of that ever again.
Sometimes, the niggers died. Spoiled, the slavers called it. And he, with a few other men no older than he was, had to unchain the dead, carry their decomposing, vacating bodies up to the deck, and hurl them over the side of the ship for the sea beasts or the ocean itself to dispose of. He wondered how many niggers had met a similar fate, if, in death, they had begun to assemble in the deep, designing the shape of their vengeance, which would come in the form of some infinitely black whirlpool or gigantic, crashing tidal wave that would wipe clean the face of the earth like it did in Noah’s time.
No. If James learned nothing else in the gray orphanage, he learned that God’s heartlessness would never again include mass murder by drowning. The rainbow was His promise that He would be more creative the next time His sadistic impulses got the better of Him. The priests had assured James of this, but only as a confession after they had already unleashed themselves on him and could no longer stand his sorrowful eyes.
Weeks sailing across the gray ocean and then they finally reached land in some place called Hispaniola. He stumbled from the ship with wobbly legs that were, after such a relatively short period, no longer accustomed to solid ground. It would take him a few months to make it to Mississippi, where his mother’s sister’s son owned a plantation. He had to make his way across untamed land where people scowled because of the heat and were suspicious of every new face. Hungry and exhausted, he arrived, on foot, at the Halifax plantation just as the sun was sinking. He could barely even stretch his arm to greet his newfound cousin, but he had strength enough for a smile.
He didn’t even allow himself the time to be overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of the land on which he stood, or the house that seemed large enough to hold everyone he ever knew. After downing bowl after bowl of possum stew, and lazy conversation with his cousin, in whom he remembered what he thought he had lost of his mother, he was escorted to a bedroom by some young darkie, and he slept until it was night again. He didn’t know what to make of Paul’s offer that he oversee the plantation and watchdog the slaves. He would get his own piece of land, right near the northern edge of the property, and he would have help with his duties, of course. Paul had befriended some poor wretches from town who were rough but malleable. He let them, too, set up their shacks just on the other side of the cotton field, a parcel of land on which they could raise their families in exchange for becoming nigger barriers. Still, they were outnumbered. They would need an equalizer.