Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [249]
It was then, when these remarks had been explained to her, that Tabakali, the Foulani woman, joined in the discussion. She spoke no pidgin at that time, but she was a bold, independent woman from a nomad people and had ranged far west along the Guinea Coast, and she could speak some Malinke, which Jimmy was able to translate. He had not been able to do full justice to the contempt that rang in the words of this tall and magnificent woman, but enough of it came through, even in the bare pidgin of his rendering: ‘She say, what you mean raise you hand agin you kind? You kind slave-taker, dat what you mean? She say, in dat case you no belong here, you ken git out. Den she say, Haines killed stealin’ gold dust from de ship. Who weepin’ for Haines? Barton sabee dat good. Sabee different, he ken speak now, we waitin’.’
Barton had remained silent. Everyone knew he had joined with Haines in the ill-fated attempt to escape with the gold.
‘She say, Libby make sick she belly. She say, Libby missin’ one eye an’ both him ball. If Libby her man, but she tank great god he not, she put him out de door. She say Wilson an’ Tiamoko same same Libby.’
‘Hooray!’ Billy Blair said, delighted at this discomfiting of his old enemy.
But Wilson was not amenable to the rules of debate, had moreover an ugly temper; not many weeks later it was to be his death. He took two steps towards the woman. ‘You black bitch,’ he said, ‘is tha callin’ me names?’
‘Stand back.’ Without conscious thought Paris had interposed himself. Wilson’s darkly bearded face was on a level with his own, the eyes in their cavernous sockets curiously vacant and unseeing. ‘Stand back,’ he said again, though not loudly or threateningly. ‘This is a time for words, not blows. Or do you not know the difference?’ he added with a sort of involuntary contempt.
Wilson continued to look sullenly at him. He showed no sign of being cowed, but after a moment, perhaps sensing opinion was against him, he fell back.
Paris turned and looked at the woman standing there. She had not given ground. She was wearing still the coarse cotton shift they had given her on the slaveship. The passion of her words had deepened her breathing. Her eyes flashed and her head was thrown back on the splendid column of her neck. Paris, who still had no woman at that time, was swept by a tide of admiration and desire more urgent than anything he had known, flooding his whole being, like a sudden brimming of the vessel in which lay all the thoughts he had had of her from the very first, when he had seen her behind the bars in the sunlit slave dungeon of the fort. He could not keep the feeling out of his eyes and Tabakali saw it.
But it was above all for Delblanc that this debate – the first one of the whole people together – was a turning point and a revelation. And the nature of this revelation did not feature in Jimmy’s account either, because it was mainly concerned with Delblanc’s knowledge of himself. He had seen at once that the Indians should be rescued. Such an act would assert the principles of freedom and natural justice on which he hoped to found this infant republic of his dreams. And it might well improve relations with the Indians, fear of whom, after the terrible death of Haines, had kept them penned in this narrow space of woodland between the exposed shore and the flooded savannah behind. But he had seen further than this. With a perception colder than he had believed possible in himself – and herein lay the element of revelation – he had seen at once that what became of the Indians was in a way a secondary issue: the slave-takers had to be killed in any case.
It was their death that he argued for, with all the force at his command, speaking directly to Paris and the people of the crew, leaving Jimmy to make the best of it he could, knowing that the whites, though in a minority, were more cohesive,