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By Root 1360 0

the waterfront he was known as the Paradise Nigger. He lived on scraps and spent what he had in the bars, where he was suffered for his gifts as an entertainer, until he got too drunk. People bought rum for him; he became something of an institution. He would sometimes play a tune on an old harmonica that he wore slung round his neck, or sing a song of the plantations. But mainly he talked – of a Liverpool ship, of a white father who had been doctor aboard her and had never died, a childhood of wonders in a place of eternal sunshine, jungle hummocks, great flocks of white birds rising from flooded savannahs, a settlement where white and black lived together in perfect accord. He claimed he could read. Also – and Mather vouches for this – he quoted snatches from the poetry of Alexander Pope. In one of his occasional pieces for the Mississippi Recorder Mather declares that he actually heard him do it. These pieces were afterwards collected and published privately under the title Sketches of Old Louisiana. The only record of the Paradise Nigger that we have is contained in this little-known work, in the chapter entitled ‘Colourful Characters of the Waterfront’. Mather says that when he returned to New Orleans after an absence of a year or so he found the mulatto gone and no one able to say what had become of him.

Continued observation of colourful characters took Mather frequently down cellar steps and he became in the course of time a colourful and visionary character himself, dying at last in a state of delirium in a Jacksonville sanatorium in 1841. His widow, preparing his papers for a collected edition, conceived it her duty to suppress the low-life material, and so the mulatto beggar was discarded, along with Big Suzanne and a transvestite guitarist named Angelo and a number of others.

Not exactly scrapped, but he was cast into the margin, into that limbo of doubtful existence where he lurks still, begging, boasting, talking about paradise, somewhere between Mather’s two trips to New Orleans, the two editions of his book. Can Mather have invented him? But this author grew lurid and disordered only in his latter days; the mulatto belongs to a cooler time. Besides, there are the quotations. I don’t believe Mather would have invented a thing like that. The mulatto invented himself – it was why he was tolerated in the bars. Some aura of my own invention lies about him too. The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever; and I have had to rely on memory, since the newspaper itself has been long defunct and its files have been destroyed or simply mouldered away. My own copy of the Sketches was lost years ago and I have never been able to unearth another or even to trace any reference to the work.

But the mulatto haunts my imagination still, with his talk of a lost paradise, raising his blind face to solicit something from me. Nothing can restore him now to Mather’s text, but he sits at the entrance to the labyrinth of mine …

BOOK ONE

1752–1753

PART ONE

ONE

The ship he meant was the Liverpool Merchant, Captain Saul Thurso, and he had never seen her, though she carried the seeds of all his dreams in her hold.

She carried death for the cotton broker who owned her, or so at least his son believed. For Erasmus Kemp it was always to seem that the ship had killed his father, and the thought poisoned his memories. Grief works its own perversions and betrayals: the shape of what we have lost is as subject to corruption as the mortal body, and Erasmus could never afterwards escape the idea that his father had been scenting his own death that drab afternoon in the timber yard on the banks of the Mersey when, amid colours of mud and saffron, he had lowered himself rather awkwardly down to sniff at the newly cut sections of mast for his ship. Not odours of embalmment, nothing sacramental; the reek of his own death.

It was an ugly thought, confirmed somehow by other remembered details, thought naturally only Erasmus himself, as host to it, could have found these admissible