A sudden chorus of cries brought the chained men jerking upright. About twenty women, most of them teen-aged, and four children, came running naked and without chains from behind the barricade, ahead of two grinning toubob with whips. Kunta instantly recognized the girls who had been brought on board with him—as with flooding rage he watched all of the toubob leering at their nakedness, some of them even rubbing their fotos. By sheer force of will, he fought the urge to go lunging after the nearest toubob despite their weapons. Hands clutched into fists, he sucked hard for air to keep breathing, wrenching his eyes away from the terrified women.
Then a toubob near the rail began pulling out and pushing in between his hands some peculiar folding thing that made a wheezing sound. Another joined in, beating on a drum from Africa, as other toubob now moved themselves into a ragged line with the naked men, women, and children staring at them. The toubob in the line had a length of rope, and each of them looped one ankle within it, as if that rope was a length of chain such as linked the naked men. Smiling now, they began jumping up and down together in short hops, keeping in time with the drumbeats and the wheezing thing. Then they and the other armed toubob gestured for the men in chains to jump in the same manner. But when the chained men continued to stand as if petrified, the toubobs’ grins became scowls, and they began laying about with whips.
“Jump!” shouted the oldest woman suddenly, in Mandinka. She was of about the rains of Kunta’s mother Binta. Bounding out, she began jumping herself. “Jump!” she cried shrilly again, glaring at the girls and children, and they jumped as she did. “Jump to kill toubob!” she shrieked, her quick eyes flashing at the naked men, her arms and hands darting in the movements of the warrior’s dance. And then, as her meaning sank home, one after another shackled pair of men began a weak, stumbling hopping up and down, their chains clanking against the deck. With his head down, Kunta saw the welter of hopping feet and legs, feeling his own legs rubbery under him as his breath came in gasps. Then the singing of the woman was joined by the girls. It was a happy sound, but the words they sang told how these horrible toubob had taken every woman into the dark corners of the canoe each night and used them like dogs. “Toubob fa!” (Kill toubob) they shrieked with smiles and laughter. The naked, jumping men joined in: “Toubob fa!” Even the toubob were grinning now, some of them clapping their hands with pleasure.
But Kunta’s knees began to buckle beneath him and his throat went tight when he saw, approaching him, the short, stocky toubob with white hair, and with him the huge, scowling one with the knife-scarred face who also had been at that place where Kunta was examined and beaten and choked and burned before he was brought here. In an instant, as the other naked people saw these two, a sudden silence fell, and the only sound to be heard was that of great, slapping cloths overhead, for even the rest of the toubob had stiffened at their presence.
Barking out something hoarsely, the huge one cleared the other toubob away from the chained people. From his belt there dangled a large ring of the slender, shiny things that Kunta had glimpsed others using as they had opened the chains. And then the white-haired one went moving among the naked people, peering closely at their bodies. Wherever he saw whip cuts badly festered, or pus draining from rat bites or burned places, he smeared on some grease from a can that the huge one handed to him. Or the huge one himself would sprinkle a yellowish powder from a container on wrists and ankles that became a sickly, moist, grayish color beneath the iron cuffs. As the two toubob moved nearer to him, Kunta shrank in fear and fury, but then the white-haired one was smearing grease on his festering places and the huge one was sprinkling his ankles and wrists with the yellowish powder, neither of them seeming even to recognize who Kunta was.
Then, suddenly, amid rising shouts among the toubob, one of the girls who had been brought with Kunta was springing wildly between frantic guards. As several of them went clutching and diving for her, she hurled herself screaming over the rail and went plunging downward. In the great shouting commotion, the white-haired toubob and the huge one snatched up whips and with bitter curses lashed the backs of those who had gone sprawling after, letting her slip from their grasp.
Then the toubob up among the cloths were yelling and pointing toward the water. Turning in that direction, the naked people saw the girl bobbing in the waves—and not far away, a pair of dark fins coursing swiftly toward her. Then came another scream—a blood-chilling one—then a frothing and thrashing, and she was dragged from sight, leaving behind only a redness in the water where she had been. For the first time, no whips fell as the chained people, sick with horror, were herded back into the dark hold and rechained into their places. Kunta’s head was reeling. After the fresh air of the ocean, the stench smelled even worse than before, and after the daylight, the hold seemed even darker. When soon a new disturbance arose, seeming somewhat distant, his practiced ears told him that the toubob were driving up onto the deck the terrified men from the level below.
After a while, he heard near his right ear a low mutter. “Jula?” Kunta’s heart leaped. He knew very little of the Wolof tongue, but he did know that Wolof and some others used the word jula to mean travelers and traders who were usually Mandinkas. And twisting his head a bit closer to the Wolof’s ear, Kunta whispered, “Jula. Mandinka.” For moments, as he lay tensely, the Wolof made no return sound. It went flashing through Kunta’s head that if he could only speak many languages, as his father’s brothers did—but he was ashamed to have brought them to this place, even in his thoughts.
“Wolof. Jebou Manga,” the other man whispered finally, and Kunta knew that was his name.
“Kunta Kinte,” he whispered back.
Exchanging a whisper now and then in their desperation to communicate, they picked at each other’s minds to learn a new word here, another there, in their respective tongues. It was much as they had learned their early words as first-kafo children. During one of the intervals of silence between them, Kunta remembered how when he had been a lookout against the baboons in the groundnut fields at night, the distant fire of a Fulani herdsman had given him a sense of comfort and he had wished that there had been some way he could exchange words with this man he had never seen. It was as if that wish were being realized now, except that it was with a Wolof, unseen for the weeks they had been lying there shackled to each other.
Every Wolof expression Kunta had ever heard he now dragged from his memory. He knew that the Wolof was doing the same with Mandinka words, of which he knew more than Kunta knew of Wolof words. In another time of silence between them, Kunta sensed that the man who lay on his other side, who never had made any sound other than moaning in pain, was listening closely to them. Kunta realized from the low murmuring that spread gradually throughout the hold that once the men had actually been able to see each other up in the daylight, he and his own shacklemate weren’t the only ones trying now to communicate with one another. The murmuring kept spreading. The hold would fall silent now only when the toubob came with the food tub, or with the brushes to clean the filth from the shelves. And there was a new quality to the quietness that would fall at these times, for the first time since they had been captured and thrown in chains, it was as if there was among the men a sense of being together.
CHAPTER 37
The next time the men were taken up onto the deck, Kunta made a point of looking at the man behind him in line, the one who lay beside him to the left when they were below. He was a Serere tribesman, much older than Kunta, and his body front and back was creased with whip cuts, some of them so deep and festering that Kunta felt badly for having wished sometimes that he might strike the man in the darkness for moaning so steadily in his pain. Staring back at Kunta, the Serere’s dark eyes were full of fury and defiance. A whip lashed out even as they stood looking at each other—this time at Kunta, spurring him to move ahead. The force of the blow drove him nearly to his knees and triggered an explosion of rage. With his throat ripping out almost an animal’s cry, Kunta lunged off
balance toward the toubob, only to fall, sprawling, dragging his shacklemate down with him, as the toubob nimbly sprang clear of them both. Men milled around them as the toubob, his eyes narrowing with hatred, brought the whip down over and over on both Kunta and the Wolof, like a slashing knife. Trying to roll away, Kunta was kicked heavily in his ribs. But somehow he and the gasping Wolof managed to stagger back up among the other men from their shelf who were shambling toward their dousing with buckets of seawater.
A moment later, the stinging saltiness of it was burning in Kunta’s wounds, and his screams joined those of others over the sound of the drum and the wheezing thing that had again begun marking time for the chained men to jump and dance for the toubob. Kunta and the Wolof were so weak from their new beating that twice they stumbled, but whip blows and kicks sent them hopping clumsily up and down in their chains. So great was his fury that Kunta was barely aware of the women singing “Toubob fa!” And when he had finally been chained back down in his place in the dark hold, his heart throbbed with a lust to murder toubob.
Every few days the eight naked toubob would again come into the stinking darkness and scrape their tubs full of the excrement that had accumulated on the shelves where the chained men lay. Kunta would lie still with his eyes staring balefully in hatred, following the bobbing orange lights, listening to the toubob cursing and sometimes slipping and falling into the slickness underfoot—so plentiful now, because of the increasing looseness of the men’s bowels, that the filth had begun to drop off the edges of the shelves down into the aisleway.
The last time they were on deck, Kunta had noticed a man limping on a badly infected leg. The chief toubob had applied grease to it, but it hadn’t helped, and the man had begun to scream horribly in the darkness of the hold. When they next went on deck, he had to be helped up, and Kunta saw that the leg, which had been grayish before, had begun to rot and stink even in the fresh air. This time the man was kept up on deck when the rest were taken back below. A few days later, the women told the other prisoners in their singing that the man’s leg had been cut off and that one of the women had been brought to tend him, but that the man had died that night and been thrown over the side. Starting then, when the toubob came to clean the shelves, they also dropped red-hot pieces of metal into pails of strong vinegar. The clouds of acrid steam left the hold smelling better, but soon it would again be overwhelmed by the choking stink. It was a smell that Kunta felt would never leave his lungs and skin.
The steady murmuring that went on in the hold whenever the toubob were gone kept growing in volume and intensity as the men began to communicate better and better with one another. Words not understood were whispered from mouth to ear along the shelves until someone who knew more than one tongue would send back their meanings. In the process, all of the men along each shelf learned new words in tongues they had not spoken before. Sometimes men jerked upward, bumping their heads, in the double excitement of communicating with each other and the fact that it was being done without the toubob’s knowledge. Muttering among themselves for hours, the men developed a deepening sense of intrigue and of brotherhood. Though they were of different villages and tribes, the feeling grew that they were not from different peoples or places.
When the toubob next came to drive them up onto the deck, the chained men marched as if they were on parade. And when they descended again, several of those men who spoke several tongues managed to change their position in line in order to get chained at the ends of shelves, thus permitting more rapid relaying of translations. The toubob never seemed to notice, for they were either unable or unconcerned to distinguish one chained man from another.
Questions, and responses to them, had begun spreading in the hold. “Where are we being taken?” That brought a babble of bitterness. “Who ever returned to tell us?” “Because they were eaten!” The question, “How long have we been here?” brought a rash of guesses of up to a moon, until the question was translated to a man who had been able to keep a count of daylights through a small air vent near where he was chained; he said that he counted eighteen days since the great canoe had sailed.
Because of intrusions by toubob with their food tub or their scrapers, an entire day might be used up in relaying of responses to a single statement or question. Anxious inquiries were passed along for men who might know each other. “Is anyone here from Barrakunda village?” someone asked one day, and after a time there came winging back from mouth to ear the joyous response, “I, Jabon Sallah, am here!” One day, Kunta nearly burst with excitement when the Wolof hastily whispered, “Is anyone here from Juffure village?” “Yes, Kunta Kinte!” he sent back breathlessly. He lay almost afraid to breathe for the hour that it took an answer to return: “Yes, that was the name. I heard the drums of his grieving village.” Kunta dissolved into sobs, his mind streaming with pictures of his family around a flapping white cockerel that died on its back as the village wadanela went to spread that sad news among all of the people who would then come to Omoro, Binta, Lamin, Suwadu, and the baby Madi, all of them squatting about and weeping as the village drums beat out the words to inform whoever might hear them far away that a son of the village named Kunta Kinte now was considered gone forever.
Days of talking sought answers to the question: “How could the toubob of this canoe be attacked and killed?” Did anyone have or know of anything that might be used as weapons? None did. Up on the deck, had anyone noticed any carelessness or weaknesses on the part of the toubob that could be useful to a surprise attack? Again, none had. The most useful information of any sort had come from the women’s singing as the men danced in their chains: that about thirty toubob were riding with them on this big canoe. There had seemed to be many more, but the women were in a better position to count them. The women said also that there had been more toubob at the beginning of the voyage, but five had died. They had been sewn inside white cloths and thrown overboard while the white-haired chief toubob read from some kind of book. The women also sang that the toubob often fought and beat each other viciously, usually as a result of arguments over which ones would next use the women.
Thanks to their singing, not much happened up on the deck that wasn’t quickly told to the men dancing in their chains, who then lay discussing it down in the hold. Then came the exciting new development that contact had been established with the men who were chained on the level yet below. Silence would fall in the hold where Kunta lay, and a question would be called out from near the hatchway. “How many are down there?” And after a time the answer would circulate on Kunta’s level: “We believe about sixty of us.”
The relaying of any information from whatever source seemed about the only function that would justify their staying alive. When there was no news, the men would talk of their families, their villages, their professions, their farms, their hunts. And more and more frequently there arose disagreements about how to kill the toubob, and when it should be tried. Some of the men felt that, whatever the consequences, the toubob should be attacked the next time they were taken up on deck. Others felt that it would be wiser to watch and wait for the best moment Bitter disagreements began to flare up. One debate was suddenly interrupted when the voice of an elder rang out, “Hear me! Though we are of different tribes and tongues, remember that we are the same people! We must be as one village, together in this place!”
Murmurings of approval spread swiftly within the hold. That voice had been heard before, giving counsel in times of special stress. It was a voice with experience and authority as well as wisdom. Soon the information passed from mouth to ear that the speaker had been the alcala of his village. After some time, he spoke again, saying now that some leader must be found and agreed upon, and some attack plan must be proposed and agreed upon before there could be any hope of overcoming the toubob, who were obviously both well organized and heavily armed. Again, the hold soon filled with mutterings of approval.
The new and comforting sense of closeness with the other men made Kunta feel
almost less aware of the stink and filth, and even the lice and rats. Then he heard the new fear that was circulating—that yet another slatee was believed to be somewhere on the level of men below. One of the women had sung of having been among the group of chained people whom this slatee had helped to bring, blindfolded, onto this canoe. She had sung that it was night when her blindfold was removed, but she had seen the toubob give that slatee liquor, which he drank until he stumbled about drunkenly, and then the toubob, all howling with laughter, had knocked him unconscious and dragged him into the hold. The woman sang that though she was not able to tell in any definite way the face of that slatee, he was almost surely somewhere below in chains like the rest, in terror that he would be discovered and killed, as he now knew that one slatee had already. In the hold, the men discussed how probably this slatee, too, was able to speak some toubob words, and in hopes of saving his miserable life, he might try to warn the toubob of any attack plans he learned of.
It occurred to Kunta, as he shook his shackles at a fat rat, why he had known little of slatees until now. It was because none of them would dare to live among people in villages, where even a strong suspicion of who they were would bring about their instant death. He remembered that back in Juffure he often had felt that his own father Omoro and yet older men, when they sat around the night fires, would seem to be needlessly occupied with dark worries and gloomy speculations about dangers to which he and the other younger men privately thought they themselves would never succumb. But now he understood why the older men had worried about the safety of the village; they had known better than he how many slatees slithered about many of them in The Gambia. The despised tan-colored sasso borro children of toubob fathers were easy to identify; but not all. Kunta thought now about the girl of his village who had been kidnaped by toubob and then escaped, who had gone to the Council of Elders just before he had been taken away, wanting to know what to do about her sasso borro infant, and he wondered what the Council of Elders had decided for her to do.