Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [248]
Perhaps they did not know this, someone suggested. Or perhaps they were not making for the sea at all, but looking for some great river they knew of, which would take them north, where they could sell their captives. That it was their intention to sell the Indians everyone was agreed – there could be no other reason for taking men and binding them.
Nothing much else was clear. At this time the people of the settlement knew only their immediate surroundings. They knew the shore and the sheltering pineland and the swamps behind. They had not ventured far into the interior for fear of the Indians, who had already killed and mutilated Haines. Thus they could form no idea of where the men had come from. But some of the crew remembered stories of whites and runaway negroes banded together down among the Florida Keys, who lived by wrecking craft on the reefs and selling any Indians they caught to the Spanish.
‘Dis de story Oose come back with,’ Jimmy said. ‘Den de people talk tagedder bout dis. Some dem say, let canoe alone, dem feller no danger to us, come for take Indian, not us. But Parry an’ Delba, dey say no. Mebbe some you member Delba, he get sick, die after. An’ Foulah woman Tabakali say no an’ Nadri say no, s’pose dem feller come back agin. What den? But dere anadder reason back behind dis why dey say no. Why dem Indian in de canoe fust place? Ya, Kenka?’
Kenka was a slender, tawny-skinned mulatto boy, who often did not put up his hand even when he knew the answer, but Jimmy had learned to recognize the look on his face when he wanted to be asked and the tense position of his body. Jimmy knew too that Tabakali, the heroine of this debate, was Kenka’s mother.
‘Dey take Indian for slave,’ the boy said proudly.
‘Dat right. Take dem for slave. Dat very ’portant reason for help dem. All people got a right to be free. Nadri say dat an’ Delba say dat. You let dem take slave? You stand one side, let dem take slave? You was slave youself. You forget so quick?’
Jimmy paused and smiled round at the children. ‘I was dere,’ he said. ‘Dem time people no talk pidgin like now, people talk lingo belong dem. I big linguister dem time.’
It was not the first debate he had assisted in: that had been held on board the ship, blood still on the deck, Thurso’s body still warm. The children knew this story too. Jimmy always went through all the stages of these famous debates, but he was a moralist as teachers often are, he wanted to instil a sense of community in the children so there were certain aspects that he omitted to mention or even falsified, his version of events was not necessarily that which lived in the memory of others who had taken part. People read into things their own truths and meanings. But everyone who had been present – and that was all of the fugitives, men and women, black and white, who had survived the voyage and the landing and the hardships of the first weeks – knew that the actions stemming from this debate had saved the settlement.
One thing Jimmy always omitted was the naming of those unheroic ones who would have let the slaver-takers go unmolested. Only Wilson was named – he took the burden of all. The others still walked the earth, their offspring were among Jimmy’s pupils; but Wilson had died in public view, disgraced and without issue, and so everything discreditable could be laid at his door. In the course of time a legendary wickedness had gathered round Wilson’s name. It had been his fate to become first scapegoat then ogre. Now mothers sometimes hushed their children with the threat that Wilson would hear them and come.
But in fact there had been others to take his side in this debate. Libby had done so, and a big, morose man from the Ivory Coast named Tiamoko. None of these had been able to see any point in intervening to save the Indians.
‘Them Indians aren’t nothin’ but savviges,’ Libby said, his solitary