I moved into a room at The King's Inn, among a set of ramshackle wooden buildings along a busy street by the water. I had only a few minutes of free time every day, and liked to start my mornings in solitude by eating breakfast in my room while I read the newspapers. Henry Millstone, who ran the tavern in the hotel, brought me the Royal Gazette and a bowl of fish chowder at seven o'clock every morning. He always liked to pause and chat.
"Lieutenant Clarkson tells me that you are the most literate Negro he has ever met," Mr. Millstone said. "Is that true?"
I was discovering something intriguing about white people. It seemed that they wanted either to sing my praises or to run me out of town. But sometimes it was difficult for me to make the transition from one sort of person to the other.
"There are some literate Negroes, Mr. Millstone, and over time there will be many more in Nova Scotia, where they are not prevented from reading."
"I wouldn't mind learning with them," he said with a laugh. "So are you going with the others to Guinea?"
"Africa," I said.
"Yes, that's what I meant."
"For the time being I am just helping the lieutenant," I said.
"Dangerous place, Africa is," he said.
I put down my soup spoon and looked him in the eye. "So is Nova Scotia."
A few days after I arrived in Halifax, three Negroes pounded on the door of my room at ten in the evening. They had just spent fifteen days walking through the woods from Saint John. An agent in that town had refused to register them for the departure, or to allow them to embark on a ship bound for Halifax, so they had no choice but to set out overland for the city, hoping to arrive before the ships departed. Clarkson agreed to admit the men.
Within a week, another hundred cold and hungry Negroes drifted by foot into Halifax. I saw men without coats, women with nothing but ragged blankets around their shoulders, and children without any clothes at all. By mid-December, boats from Shelburne and Annapolis Royal had transported more people to town, bringing the total of Negro adventurers to more than one thousand.
Clarkson lodged people in warehouses by the water, brought blankets so they wouldn't freeze at night and hired dozens of women to boil up cauldrons of food every evening. He worked all day and through half the nights, buying clothes for the naked and arranging medical care for the sick between his long hours at the docks. While I spread the word about what the Nova Scotians were allowed to take to Sierra Leone—no more than one dog for every six families, fowls but not pigs, a trunk of clothing but no tables or chairs—Clarkson oversaw the provisioning of ships. He spoke daily of the health of the travelling Negroes, and in each ship ordered pitch boiled, decks scrubbed with vinegar, and all sleeping quarters refitted to allow for a minimum height of five feet. He even posted a Bill of Fare to reassure travellers that they would be properly fed. At breakfast and supper, we would eat Indian meal with molasses or brown sugar. At dinner, we would have salt fish days, pork days or beef days, and eat turnips, peas or potatoes.
Clarkson arranged to have nearly two hundred turkeys slaughtered, dressed and cooked for a feast on Christmas Day, and for each man or woman to have one cup of beer or wine. During the course of the meal, he took me along as he walked from warehouse to warehouse to address the adventurers. He prayed with each group and repeated his "Rules and Regulations for the Free Black People Embarking for Sierra Leone." He usually dealt respectfully with individuals, but had a tendency to speak to groups as if they were children. I flinched when he instructed the assembled travellers to pay attention to divine worship, to use soft words to prevent broils and not to make friendly with the seamen. However, none of the Negroes objected to his lectures. They venerated the man who was leading them to Africa.
The Governor and his wife invited Clarkson and me to dine with them for Christmas. As we entered their palatial home, Clarkson whispered to me that Government House had been built at a cost of twenty thousand pounds, and that the same amount would have employed one thousand Negro labourers for a year. Clarkson and I joined sixteen other guests in the dining room. Mrs. Wentworth was a loud, cigar-smoking woman, and we were barely into the meal when she turned the conversation to the migration.
"I'll say, Lieutenant, it's quite the voyage you are cooking up."
"It means a great deal to the Negroes," Clarkson said.
"Do you honestly believe they'll have a better go of things in the tropics?" she asked.
I was tired of letting them debate as if I wasn't there, so I added a comment of my own: "We have waited eight years for land, and most of us still don't have it."
"Every Nova Scotian can tell stories of delays in getting their land," she said. "It's not just blacks who are clamouring for acreage."
"It's about more than land," I said. "It's about freedom. Negroes want to make our own lives. But we are wilting here."
"You take our provisions and our handouts when it suits you," she said. "That doesn't sound like wilting to me—"
Governor Wentworth cut in. "Speaking of freedom, may I propose a toast to His Majesty the King?"
After fruit and cheese were served, a butler showed up to offer guests a tour of Government House. Clarkson and I followed some of the others up and down endless flights of stairs and in and out of rooms full of portraits, but only the map room caught my attention. The butler said there were maps from every conceivable place in the world. When the tour left the room, Clarkson and I stayed behind. I thumbed through a thick wad of maps while Clarkson complained that the dinner had wasted his time.
"It's doubtful that you could get much work done on Christmas," I said.
Clarkson said he still had to finish outfitting the ships and look into finding another ship's surgeon. He had asked Wentworth if he could take one of the royal surgeons from Halifax on the mission to Sierra Leone, but the governor had refused. Clarkson nearly choked with anger as he described the situation. One surgeon for a flotilla of fifteen ships was grossly inadequate, he said. What if the ships got separated on the voyage? What good was a surgeon on one ship if somebody was dying on another?
"Plainly," Clarkson said, "he doesn't want me to succeed in my business. He would prefer that the free blacks stay right here to prove that they are content in Nova Scotia and that their complaints of ill treatment are groundless."
Clarkson was breathing heavily and starting to wave his hands wildly. I sat with him for a minute and managed to calm him down by urging him to take steady, regular breaths, and breathing along with him. When he settled down to join the other guests for a drink, I had the maps to myself.
Somebody had taken the trouble to organize them into categories: British North America, Nova Scotia, the Thirteen Colonies, England, Jamaica and Barbados, and Guinea.
From the portfolio marked Guinea, I removed the first map and spread it out on a table with two burning candles. It showed the typical paintings of half-dressed African men and naked African women, usually with baboons and elephants nearby.
Reaching again into the Guinea portfolio, I pulled out a piece of paper with flowery handwriting: "Copied from On Poetry: A Rhapsody, by Jonathan Swift, 1733." And then I found the lines:
So geographers, in Afric-maps, With savage-pictures fill their gaps; And o'er unhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns.
Elephants for want of towns. I found it comforting to know that nearly sixty years earlier, before I was even born, Swift had expressed the very thing I was feeling now. These weren't maps of Africa. In the ornate cartouches of elephants and of women with huge breasts that rose in unlikely salute, every stroke of paint told me that the map-makers had little to say about my land.
I pulled out the next map, and the next, and the next, but they were old maps with no details that I hadn't already discovered. They listed the Grain Coast, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast, and they showed some of the major ports, such as Bonny and Elmina. I always remembered that last one, because it sounded like my name. Finally, I pulled out the most recent map t
hat I had ever seen of Africa. It was dated 1789, and printed in London. I saw slave ports again, such as Wydah and Elmina. But much farther to the northwest, I saw another slave port: Bance Island. I remembered that William King, the slave trader in South Carolina, had told me that I had been shipped from Bance Island. I could not tell if Bance Island belonged to a particular country, but the words "Sierra Leone" appeared slightly to the southeast. I studied the map more closely. Although there were still the obligatory naked African women with children on their backs, and monkeys and elephants—especially in the so-called "Zarra or Desert of Barbary"—I also found the names of a few inland towns. This map had the coastal ports—most of them, it seemed—but also a few villages. From my childhood, I remembered my father promising to take me one day to the town of Segu. He had said it was about four days by foot from our village. And now I saw the name appearing a few inches north of Bance Island. I was puzzling over what four inches meant in real distance, when John Clarkson came back for me.
"Could we sit?" he said. "I want to have a word with you."
I sat facing him, imagining that he had come to speak about all the work remaining.
"You asked me to look into your husband's ship," Clarkson said. "The Joseph, which sailed from New York when you were being evacuated."
"That's right." I put my hands together, formed my fingers into a steeple. Sitting my chin in the crook of my thumbs, I pressed my nose with my index fingers.
Clarkson cleared his throat. "The ship went down."
I sat there, motionless.
"I checked with the British naval authorities," he said, then coughed. "They have an office down the street. Manifests, records, ships logs—they keep all that."
I couldn't move or speak.
"The Joseph went down," he said again. "It was blown off course in high winds. It was blown so far off course that it almost made it to Bermuda. But then, in a huge storm, it sank. Everybody on board was lost. The captain, the crew, the Loyalists white and black. I'm so sorry. But you did ask me to find out."
"When did you hear about it?" I asked.
"Today."
John Clarkson reached out to put his hand on my shoulder, but I recoiled from him and ran from Government House. I didn't want to be seen or touched. I wanted only to be alone with the news. Chekura. My husband. After such a long journey. Gone, on the very vessel that I should have taken.
I wondered how the ship had gone down. Perhaps it had been struck by lightning, or had flipped in the churning sea. Had my husband died quickly, or had he had time to think of me as the water swallowed up his body? I consoled myself by imagining that he had probably been helping somebody else. Holding a child, perhaps. So very many Africans had been lost at sea, and many more again had been lost on the way to and from the slave ships. And now . . . this.
Many times I could have died, yet I was here still, now on the precipice of yet another journey across the water. The first one had been involuntary. This one was my choice. Chekura was dead. Mamadu was dead. May had been gone for five years. If she was still alive, she probably didn't remember me, and most certainly wasn't coming back. I missed all three of my loved ones so terribly that my body, it seemed, was half missing.
I spent a morning in my room in the King's Inn, emptying my grief into a pillow. Then I returned to help John Clarkson. I would take what was left of my body and spirit and join the exodus to Africa. There was nothing left for me in Nova Scotia. I imagined May showing up at Shelburne and asking for me, and this gave me trouble breathing. I tried to calm myself by holding a book, stroking its cover and opening to a random passage, which I read over and over until I was able to speak the words. No matter what the book or the passage, the matter of reading it out loud brought me to a simple truth that I had denied for years in Birchtown: I would never see May again, and it was time to move on.
WE FORMED QUIET, ORDERLY LINES on the docks in the Halifax harbour. Huddled in the wind and the rain, waiting our turn to be rowed to the ships, we spoke in whispers. One out of every three men and women had, like me, been born in Africa. Including children, there were 1,200 of us. It took five days for the storm to subside. I boarded the Lucretia with John Clarkson, the ship surgeon and all the pregnant women and ailing adventurers. On January 15, 1792, our fifteen ships lifted anchor and set sail for Sierra Leone.
Book Four
Toubab with black face
{Freetown, 1792}
IN MY OWN SHIP, THE LUCRETIA, seven out of the 150 passengers died during the ocean crossing. John Clarkson himself nearly succumbed, choking on his own vomit during a storm, but was rescued. He remained bedridden for most of our journey, though he rallied as our ship sailed into St. George's Bay on March 9, 1792. I scoured the green mountains. From my childhood, I remembered the profile of the lion's back and head. Sierra Leone—Lion Mountain—rose up so sharply on the peninsula that I wanted to reach out and touch it.
I knew now that I had come, some thirty-six years earlier, from a slave ship that had left Bance Island. I had found the island on a map, and Clarkson had told me that it was in Sierra Leone. But until the coast with the lion-shaped mountain came into sight, I had doubted that I would truly return to the place of my departure. It had seemed too much to hope for.
The Nova Scotians hugged one another on the deck of the Lucretia and shouted praise to Jesus and to John Clarkson.
"Please, that's enough," Clarkson said, laughing but embarrassed.
"Tell us more about this land you've taken us to," a woman called out.
"I'm afraid I'm like most of you," Clarkson said, fixing his eyes on the coast. "I've never been to Africa before."
I stared at him, and noticed others doing the same. It had never occurred to me that the man who had led our exodus from Nova Scotia had never seen my homeland.
To break the silence, one of Clarkson's officers tipped a barrel and poured rum into glasses for the men and the women. I wanted no drink, felt no need for laughter, and preferred to stand alone at the ship's railing. I pressed my hands to the wooden bar, felt the humid breeze on my face, and wondered what would become of me now. I had expected to be overjoyed, but instead felt deflated. Waves crashed up against the shores of Africa, yet my true homeland was still far from sight. If I ever did make it home, I knew the one question that people would ask: Where are your husband and children? I would have to confess that in the land of the toubabu, I had managed to save only myself.
The crossing had taken nearly two months, but our waiting was not over yet. While the fifteen ships in our flotilla from Halifax dropped their anchors and baked for three days in the African sun, Clarkson was rowed back and forth between our ships and a handful of others already in the harbour. I could see that they too flew the flag of the Sierra Leone Company—two clasped hands, one black and the other white.
I felt relieved, seeing that they were friendly ships, but Thomas Peters ranted about them to me and to any other passengers who would listen. Peters was fond of reminding us that he had been the one to make the migration possible, by travelling to London two years earlier to complain that the Black Loyalists were still without land in Nova Scotia.
But now Peters had something new to say: "What are all those ships from London doing here? This was supposed to be our colony. Our new life. And all decisions in our hands. But what are we doing? Waiting while Lieutenant Clarkson discusses our fate with other white men."
Clarkson had hired a group of African men to row him about St. George's Bay. We all stood on deck, admiring the rowers' muscles and their sleek, smooth paddling, until Peters had a chance to put his questions to Clarkson.
"And who are those men?" Peters asked.
"They are the Temne, and they belong to King Jimmy," Clarkson said.
"And who is he?"
"The local ruler."
"And these men, what do they normally do?" Peters asked.
"They are rowing men, for carrying goods and people."
"What kinds of people? Sl
aves?"
Clarkson's face began to redden.
Peters raised his palm. "No disrespect intended. Just tell us. Do those men row slaves in these waters?"
Clarkson coughed, and took a moment to compose his answer. While he was thinking, we slowly gathered around him.
"Thomas," I said to Peters, "why don't we all stand back a little and give the man room to breathe?"
"Thank you, Meena," Clarkson said. "I have already told you that there are slavery operations in Sierra Leone."
"But on our doorstep?" Peters said.
"Hardly," Clarkson said. "On Bance Island, eighteen miles down the bay."
"But Mr. Clarkson," I said. Many heads turned to watch, because everybody knew that Clarkson and I got along well. "How," I continued, "could you put us anywhere near a hive of slave trading?"
"It's not as if we had twenty choices," Clarkson said. "This is where we have operations. This is where we have negotiated with the locals. And this, at least, is removed from the activities of the slavers."
I heard a few people cursing. I was happy that we had sailed close enough to Bance Island for me to see the shore and be sure that this was the land from which I had been taken. But I wished right now that we could drift another two hundred miles along the coast, in any direction.
Clarkson seemed to guess my thoughts. "At any place where Europeans have established themselves on the Guinea coast, you will find slavetrading factories. Nowhere is safer than this. Our mission is special, and our colony will be different. We will thrive with farming, industry and trade, and find our own ways to serve the British Empire."
"We didn't leave our homes in Nova Scotia to serve the British," Peters said. "We came to Africa to be free."
"That you shall be," Clarkson said. "I have given you my word. Is this perfectly clear? None of you shall be taken as slaves."
Peters fell silent. He had echoed my very concerns, but I reasoned that Bance Island was far enough away. If I could go where I pleased, I would never even have to see it.