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“Slaves, rise and move to one side!” Massamba was beginning to learn English, accumulating understood commands. He stood with his kindred. A child slave shoved itself through the child door which had been carved into the dividing wall, a door for a dog, if the dog’s mother were divided from its father. It disappeared into its mother’s bosom, and the little door swung back and forth.
A light appeared from above, from the hatch door. It poured, the sun did, into the hold. Tickled demons danced around the hatch, hesitating to come down. “It stinks!” Massamba learned to understand. “It stinks!” the tickled demons said, white and howling. The joys of the overseers were increased by the dancing, set to time by the crack of the whip.
The whip employed was different from the horse whip used on land: this was the cat-o’-nine-tails, a shorter, vicious little devil, a short-handled leather medusa with nine devil heads, one on the end of each strip. It was meant not to guide, but to deliver hurt. The howling rose in pitch and volume with each hurt, given nine times over with the merest joyous flick of the wrist, and soon the shriek of tickled demons filled the hold, burdened with swab mops and buckets.
The plug in the slave hold deck floor was removed and water sloshed toward it. The first empty bucket was swung. A tickled demon, white, howling, swung it toward Massamba. It missed, hitting his kindred who was standing next to him; it hit his kindred in the jaw, and he fell.
“Get up!” came the command. Massamba understood, and he reached down to help his kindred rise. A swab handle cracked itself upon Massamba’s head. The demon who wielded it howled in pain, grasping his wrist. Gold shined down the hatch and it cried out: “Do not harm the slaves; just swab out their excrement. Those slaves are only flesh and blood like you, and flesh and blood is gold, much gold, fine gold, precious gold. As for you, I cannot sell you, and you have no gold for me to take. If another slave comes to harm, it will be your flesh and blood I take.”
Massamba was surprised by how much he understood. He reached down to help his kindred stand. He said to him, “Health. We are worth more here than these white men with mops and buckets. Health, brother. Health!” His kindred wobbled on his feet, swaying with the boat, a desperation to stand etched on his face. “Do not be afraid,” Massamba said. “Do not be afraid. We will be repaid.”
Massamba glanced at the board where he normally lay, and his heart was gripped with fear. The elm samara was there! How had he relinquished it? How? His spine stiffened so much that his back began to spasm with pain. He stood erect, unmoving. “Do not be afraid,” he said through gritted teeth.
An overseer came down, bearing a cat-o’-nine-tails, and everyone stood stiff and erect, bedeviled, unmoving, black slave and tickled demon alike. “Work!” the overseer cried out, and the cat-o’-nine-tails rose high. The tickled demons howled and sloshed and swabbed. One of them saw the samara and paused. He cocked his head and drew near to it, putting his face nearly into the seed. Finally, with great deliberation, he reached out his hand and laid a finger upon it. As though stung, he jerked his hand back and began to dance, howling. The overseer brought his eyes over to the hurt demon, and those overseeing eyes apprehended the samara.
He leaned over to pick it up, whereupon an irresistible force came upon Massamba. He stepped forward and said, in English, “Mine.”
“A possession? For a slave?” The overseer leered, his joy growing. The icy golden light brightened the hold, shining from above.
A voice with a scowl came down, saying, “Is it of any value?”
The overseer shouted upward, saying, “Nay, Captain. ‘Tis a mere samara of the elm, caked with blood.”
“Alas,” said the golden scowl.
The overseer picked it up, looked it over, and handed it to Massamba, as if handing him a tarnished and debased ha’penny. All the slaves looked upon Massamba with wonder, as if he had cast a tropical spell upon the cruelest ice lord.
“Swab this deck!” the overseer shouted.
Massamba looked at his filthy body and longed to swim in the ocean, perhaps to swim in it forever, until he fell asleep to be prepared to be awakened.
“To the other side, slaves!” the overseer shouted, and the cat-o’-nine-tails hovered in the air, over the white men whose backs were bent and whose howling rent asunder all hope for peace. The slaves moved from one side of the deck to the other, while the white men bent to their labor, bedeviled by the cat-o'-nine-tails.
Massamba held the samara gingerly, pinching one thin corner of the seed pod between his thumb and index finger. He remembered having a loincloth.
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The Royal African Company was still learning its trade. The dividing wall, for example, which separated the men from the women, had been installed to remove the passions of love and lust, those primeval passions which drove slaves into rebellion, at the great loss of slave life, not to mention the tickled demons who were killed by their African superiors in physicality. But here, even on this journey, the slaves were issued loincloths. They were taken away the very next day, for in that very first night, two men, seeing their new station as slaves, had take the cloth off their loins and wrapped them around their neck, hanging themselves from rough spots in the timber of the hold ceiling.
Now they were naked, and sloshed with seawater every other day.
Thus Massamba had tucked the samara into his loincloth the first night, and after the nakedness came, for fear of their white torturers, those white men under the bedeviling cat-o’-nine-tails, he tucked the samara into his rectum when they came to slosh the hold decks. Today the dysentery betrayed the samara, and there it lay upon the boards, caked with blood and excreta, for the overseer.
From that moment, however, when the overseer delivered over the caked seed of life as a scepter, Massamba wielded new power.
“No,” he said, moments later, to one of his kindred, whose eye was murder, a murderous eye laid upon one of the tickled demons who was trying to scale the rope ladder out of the hold. “Do not be afraid. It will only bring vengeance.” His kindred obeyed, and he disciplined his eye, staying murder.
Before the ship hit the ocean, in those days when she lingered in the mouth of the river, like a gigantic viper pregnant with so many slaves in her hold, and with so many demons climbing in and out of the hold, tending to them with food and water, with soap and brine, the days passed cruelly in nakedness.
The slaves began to moan, wordlessly, in the rhythm of the ocean, a slow roll, up, and then down, the repressed spirit looking for God, and finding no one.
“We are under a curse,” Massamba said.
“Shut up,” said one of his kindred. “My wife is hidden from me, and my spirit is drowning.”
“Do not be afraid,” Massamba said. “The curse will be glorified.”
“Broken.”
“Glorified,” Massamba corrected. “Do you not understand?”
“No, I do not.”
Rising, the moaning lamentation was bound by the hatch of the slave hold, suffocating hope with all the heat of Africa, even while the Royal African Company ship was laden with supplies for the passage.
Now, passing over the ocean for more than one full course of the moon, the last of the tickled demons made his way up the rope ladder, Massamba said, “No,” to his kindred, holding the samara as his scepter, and his kindred heard and obeyed.
The child scampered back through the dog-door, whispering messages to the married men as they lay upon their boards.
Massamba said, in a lamentation of his language, out loud to his kindred, “Eat well, as much as you can. Our captain gives us more strength than even his labor, for they cost him gold without recompense, being freemen. We are slaves, and we must be sold in strength, or so he reckons, to line his soul with ever more of that wintry gold. Eat well the cook’s victuals, and be strong.”
Thus disguised by lamentation, Massamba made vengeance come forward. The child passed back and forth through the little swinging door for two days, whispering messages into the ears of all the married people. The moans of the lamentation wailed, rising and falling.
“Slaves, rise and move to one side!” The light burst forth. The ladder came down. The slaves rose and moved to one side of the deck. The cat-o’-nine-tails flashed into view, and the tickled demons came down, howling. A bucket was swung.
The bucket did not find a target. In fact, Massamba caught it in midair. It was the signal, rehearsed under the disguise of the wailing lament, bound to the rhythm of the unassailable ocean, holding much more power than the manmade cat-o’-nine-tails and the joyous songs which came with it.
There was no joy below the main deck, as the slave deck was being washed not with seawater but with blood. The slave women rose from their boards, shrieking in lamentation, up and down, banging on the dividing wall, threatening to break it. Shouts of consternation, not joy, floated down from above, preparations being made to bring the recompense of wintry gold.
“Do not be afraid,” Massamba said. Every bucket and swabbing mop had been requisitioned by the slaves. They beat upon the white men, who howled.
A musket fired its load, all of it, overcharged. The ball struck a slave, and he fell, silently, bleeding, but the ball continued, and a white demon was tickled to death, and he howled, writhing, bleeding. The ball thereby ceased. Another musket fired its load, and again it happened in the same way, a silent death and a howling one, blood washing the slaves’ filth into the open plug, where it all stank and rotted together below decks.
“Yes,” said Massamba. The mass of white and black slaves joined their blood together while overseers killed two after another. “Do not be afraid.” He delivered the samara to his kindred, saying, “I will require it of you, or you will die forever.” His kindred looked at him with terror. “Do not be afraid.”
Three overseers were required. Three overseers seized Massamba, who laid not a hand on any of his captors, except all the hands of those in his shade, how they killed their captors, and how their captors killed them and themselves, for gold.
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The idol shined and stood, saying words of threat and violence, but Massamba was not afraid. He did not smile, but he did not quail. The cat-o’-nine-tails hovered, ready to bring the devil upon Massamba's flesh nine times over. “Nay!” said the idol, shining in cold fury. “I will not have him further debased!”
To the screws he sent Massamba. They turned the screws upon his thumbs, but he cried out not. Not did he cry out, not for many long minutes of sweat and labor. The overseers spoke in words consternated while they endured the anticipation for the joy of an outcry.
At last, Massamba was broken. His mind darkened and reeled. The deck came up to meet him, and he cried out, broken. The joys of the overseers filled his mind with utter darkness, and he slept.
The moaning lamentation rose and fell, and upon one of its swells Massamba awoke. Upon awaking, his kindred pressed the elm samara into his hand, and Massamba ruled again.
When one of his kindred demanded, “I wish to throw myself into the sea,” Massamba took counsel. If he said, “Yes,” then his kindred threw himself into the sea, usually with a musket ball passing from his back through his chest, sometimes with a tickled demon howling, clutching him. If he said, “No,” then there was peace.
The ship stood still. Thirty of his kindred men remained. He made inquiries of the child, who whispered to him, “Forty.” Seventy had lived. Thirty had died. Twenty of their tormentors had also died, including one of the overseers, who could not stop the flow of dysentery in himself. The passage was dear, a precious passage, costly: thirty lost slaves, and twenty lost souls, but of those latter, swarms of lost souls awaited passage, lured by the sight of all that gold, to replace those who howled like tickled demons.
The overseer who gave him the scepter answered his inquiry, saying, “South Carolina.”
A great scowl issued forth, raising shouts of joy from the port at hand, so many white men driven in the madness of slave trade, preparing the way for the leering African chieftains and their elephant of blue, heralds of the golden shield. The shining flesh-and-blood idol laid upon himself his gilded wardrobe, and he began the preparations for the shore and the piling of gold.
His teeth were already counting gold pieces when he sent forth the command, “Let them wash, then clothe them for sale.”
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