Seeking Eden Read online

  Two demons seize me, push me down, press red-hot iron into my flesh. I scream, then faint from the pain.

  We are all made to strip naked, even the women, even my mother. The women and girls cry and try to cover themselves with their hands.

  More demons come. They force open my mouth, look at my teeth, my anus, handle my genitals. I weep with shame.

  We are all herded into a compound and kept there many days and fed like animals from big troughs of rice or cassava. The compound is foul and stinking. Every day people die.

  At last they take some of us and row us out to one of the great winged boats they call ships. I am taken, but my mother, my brothers and my sister Musu are left behind. I see the water widening between us. I scream their names. All around me, people wail and cry out to those on shore. A man leaps overboard, but the demons catch him, haul him back in.

  They force us up a ladder, make us board the ship. We are separated: women and girls; boys; men. I am placed with the men. All are strangers to me. They chain and shackle us, drive us down into the belly of the ship. A vile smell rushes up from its guts.

  Four

  Leaving Deal was a high point, a moment of hope, but it was not long before tedium and discomfort began to affect us all. Eighty passengers, a full crew: we had not enough room, no escape, no place to be alone. Friends do not engage much in outward quarrels, but there was friction and reproach and an undercurrent of constant irritation among the adults. Nevertheless, most people tried to help one another. My father suffered badly from seasickness at first, and Sarah coughed and wheezed and became very pale, causing much anxiety. Our neighbours were kind; one offered a ginger syrup for Sarah, another a calming herbal drink for my father.

  Before long the overcrowded cabins began to smell bad. My mother had brought wormwood and rosemary to purify the air, and she cleaned regularly around the cabin with vinegar, but there was no freshening breeze to blow through it.

  I went up on deck whenever I could, and spent much of my time looking out at the sea. Day after day I saw nothing but the ocean, its roll and swell, changing in colour from grey to green, to storm-dark, or flashing gold when the sun lit its surface. Only occasionally did I see a distant ship.

  Sometimes my father or Betty joined me. My mother came up regularly to take the air, but the vastness of the ocean, and the knowledge that it would look the same for at least two months, and that every day took us further from England, overwhelmed and terrified her. My mother is not a timid woman; she has endured many hardships and has never been afraid to speak the truth and suffer for it; but this immensity of ocean between her home and America was too much for her.

  I wrote in my journal, and made small sketches: coils of rope; the sails and rigging; and, secretly, people’s faces – for I longed to learn how to capture a likeness, despite Friends’ disapproval of such images. And I talked to the sailors and asked questions. One of the crew – not a sailor but the ship’s cooper – was an older man who liked to talk. His name was Walt Burney and he had been at sea since he was fifteen. This was his third voyage on an immigrant ship. He told me we’d been lucky: only seasickness so far, no contagion such as the smallpox that had raged through the ship on his voyage last year, killing two dozen or so passengers. He reminisced about the places he’d visited, from Newfoundland to the Caribbean, and the islands off the coasts of Spain and Africa.

  “We’re sailing for Madeira now,” he said, “for Funchal – that’s the capital. “We’ll take on water, fruit, vegetables, wine. Madeira’s a beautiful island.” He winked. “Lovely women.”

  When we reached Funchal the sea was blue, the sun shining, and the island a green, inviting place with forested mountain slopes rising above the harbour. We were able to disembark for a few hours and wander on unsteady sea-legs around the streets and markets, and marvel at the palm trees, the warm breeze, the brightness and colour. My mother was glad to be on land again; she seemed to open out like a flower and come alive in the sunshine.

  We split into small groups, but such an influx of dark-clad, pale-faced Londoners could not go unnoticed, and people stared at us.

  “You are Quakers?” a woman asked us in English. She was a stallholder, selling linen goods: cloths and caps – pretty, embroidered things set out to catch the eye. “You go to America?”

  “We are plain folk, and need little to take with us,” my mother said.

  But the woman was persistent. I left her trying to interest my mother in caps for Betty and Sarah that had white embroidery: “Only a little stitching, see? So neat, so simple, for the young girls…”

  I wandered off, around the nearby streets, drawn by the colour and warmth, the blossoming trees full of purple flowers, the white-painted houses with iron balconies, the strangeness of everything. A great square-towered fortress loomed above the town, and the houses were set all down the mountainside in a cascade of red-tiled roofs. I saw steeple-houses with brightly painted statues of saints and the Virgin Mary, which reminded me that this was a Catholic country; and although I had been brought up to worship God in simplicity, when I glanced in through the open door of one of these places I thought how beautiful and inviting the dim interior looked, glowing with candlelight and the gleam of gold.

  I paused to listen to a blind man playing a flute – a pensive tune with rhythms strange but fascinating to my ear – and dropped a coin in his hat, though I didn’t know whether an English penny could be of use to him.

  The language I heard all around me was, I supposed, Portuguese, but the people were mixed. I saw many Negroes working as porters, as sailors, or haggling in the market; the women, dressed in scarlet, blue or yellow, walked like queens, balancing baskets of fruit or rolls of cloth on their heads. Who were these people, I wondered? Were they slaves of the Portuguese? Or settlers? Were they born here? My life in London had been narrow, I realized; there was so much I did not know.

  I asked my parents about the people as we walked back to the ship.

  “I’m told there are generations of Africans here,” my father said. “Some are freedmen, many others born to slavery. It is a barbaric practice, the taking of slaves.”

  It shocked me to think that children could be born into slavery. We did not have time to discuss the matter further, for we had reached the ship and were about to board, but I felt glad to be going to a colony where the laws of England would prevail and where the light that is in all men would be recognized.

  Within the hour we left Madeira, and soon were once again at sea with no sight of land. And now, from nowhere it seemed, came a series of great storms that buffeted the ship and caused all her timbers to creak and strain so that we feared she would be pulled apart. We stayed below and prayed as huge waves broke and streamed across the decks. Day and night the wind shrieked in the rigging. It was fearful, and yet exhilarating, and in a strange way I loved to feel its power.

  But the storms kept me below, and I soon felt bored and restless. Occasionally I thought I heard, through the howling of the wind, strains of music – country tunes played on a flute and fiddle – coming from the deck beneath ours. This was the orlop deck, dark and low, where a few poorer immigrants and some of the crew slept. I have always been drawn to music, though Friends frown upon it (“a waste of time and an incitement to carnal passions”, our schoolmaster had warned), and one day I ventured down there, and came into a low space among barrels and coils of rope. A lantern hung from a beam, and in its lurch and swing as the ship rolled I saw several people gathered, the fiddler sawing away, and others singing and clapping.

  Someone laughed. “Good day, Quaker boy! Hast thou come to silence us?”

  “No. To listen – if I may?” I wished people would not always mock Friends.

  “Aye, well you won’t hear much music in holy Pennsylvania!”

  Their laughter was friendly enough. They let me stay, and one of them, a youth of about my own age, moved up to make space for me to sit next to him. He told me he was an indentured servant �
�� one of several hired in Deal by the captain.

  “See, the way it works, the captain pays for my passage, and in return I agree to work for him without wages for four years. So he goes to a notary and gets an indenture drawn up, all legal. Then, when we get to America, he’ll sell the indenture to my new master. That’ll be a settler, most likely, wanting labouring work.”

  “Four years without pay!”

  I thought of my unhappy experience with Thomas Green. I was shocked. I had not heard of this system before.

  “It’s a chance, an adventure!” the youth said. “They say folk can make their fortunes in the New World…”

  After that first encounter I went down several times to the orlop deck to listen to the music, or join in singing. The others often played at dice or cards, and were surprised that I knew how to play. But I was inexperienced, and though I won some money, in the end I lost more than I gained.

  My mother asked, “Who are these companions thou hast met below?”

  She was uneasy; and I knew she would not approve. My parents had warned me that I seemed to have an instinct for finding the wrong sort of company. And yet, I thought rebelliously, the light is in all of us.

  Now, as suddenly as they had come, the storms subsided, and we were in calm seas. Everyone began spending more time on deck.

  Betty and I often went up early in the mornings, before most people were about, to look out at the sea. Once we saw monstrous grey shapes rise, roll and sink in the distance. A plume of water shot skywards.

  “Whales,” said Betty, in a voice of wonder.

  I had never thought to see the Leviathan with my own eyes; yet here he was, at play in the vastness of the ocean. We stared, amazed.

  “We have been thirty-two days at sea,” I said the next day, as we stood at the rail. I had been keeping a tally in my journal.

  “Thirty-three,” said Betty. It seemed she had been doing the same. She said I had missed a day; I thought she’d miscounted. We bickered amicably until Betty said, “Look! A ship!”

  It was on our larboard side, coming out of the south towards us, but veering gradually west until we were on a parallel course.

  Bound for the Caribbean, I thought; like us.

  I supposed it to be a ship of a similar size to ours, but could see no detail, only its silhouette.

  It was far off, but the wind blew from the south, bringing the faint sound of voices to us in gusts; and with the sound came a smell, a stench – foul, like nothing I’d ever smelt before, even in the shambles or the stinking rivers of London in summer. Excrement, blood, vomit: a smell of filth and fear. Appalled, I took a step back.

  “What is it? What is that ship, Jos?” Betty’s voice shook.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  And yet I did know. Somehow I had known at once, instinctively.

  Others were coming on deck now. Walt Burney was near by. We turned our faces to him.

  “It’s a slaver,” he said. “With a cargo from Africa. You can smell a slave ship from five miles away. Better go below, the two of you. Wait till it passes.”

  Betty, hands over her nose, gagged and bolted down the gangway. The urge to follow her was strong, yet I held myself there. I thought of the Negroes I’d seen in Madeira. Since leaving England I had become more aware of slavery, and this ship was not something I felt I should run from.

  “How many slaves could be on there?” I asked Walt.

  He shrugged. “Two or three hundred – maybe more.”

  On a ship perhaps the size of ours. And we were cramped with eighty passengers.

  “Where will it be going?”

  “Jamaica? Barbados? Or Virginia.”

  “Hast thou ever sailed on a slaver?”

  “Once, yes.”

  “An English ship?”

  “Aye, we sailed from Bristol.”

  He seemed unwilling to say more, and I went below.

  Many days later, when we approached Barbados, there was no sign of the slave ship. High winds and heavy seas kept us from making landfall in the Caribbean, but some traders rowed out to sell us fruit, wine and water.

  My father bought a melon, fresh, cool-smelling, pale green and rosy inside. He cut it up and we shared it, laughing as the juice ran down our chins.

  But the memory of the slave ship stayed in my mind.

  The Promise turned north-east, and we came at last in sight of the coast of mainland America. It was distant – a thin grey line scarcely distinguishable from the sea until it was pointed out to us – but a source of great excitement and relief after so many weeks.

  Now we became impatient. Our ship followed the coast northwards day after day, never drawing nearer, the only change being in the air, which grew cooler. But at last came an evening when we felt the ship begin to turn, towards the land.

  The coast was far off. We would not reach it that night, and as darkness fell we retreated once more to our sleeping spaces. I woke from light sleep constantly throughout the night, felt the ship moving and imagined the land drawing nearer: the New World…

  By dawn I was sleeping heavily, and it was Betty who woke me: “Jos! We’re here!”

  I pulled on my coat and breeches, pushed my feet into my shoes.

  Betty shook our parents and Sarah. “Mam! Dad! Wake up!”

  As they began to stir, we two hurried to be among the first, scrambling up the gangway, out of the stink and darkness into cold grey daylight.

  “There!”

  “It’s huge!” I said. “Huge! I never imagined…”

  Delaware Bay was an immense body of water. On either shore, in the far distance, low sandy hills rose up, covered with pine trees. We saw wooden buildings, and, beyond them, meadows and forest – endless forest, it seemed, that stretched as far as I could see. After London, with its low smoky sky and circling kites, the sky here was so big it seemed almost too much to bear. It reduced me to a speck on the ocean. And yet there was such a promise of freedom in that great sky, that wide water, that land of forests and grassy meadows that seemed to have no end.

  We reached Philadelphia two days later, after a long wearying journey upriver during which we passed many towns and settlements. As we sailed into the harbour on the Delaware everyone was on deck, eager to see, and I thought the ship must be in danger of capsizing as we all crowded to the same side. Friends prayed and thanked God for our safe passage. Some fell to their knees. Many were in tears.

  A steep bank, which appeared to be full of excavations, rose above the harbour. We anchored some way out and were taken in boats to the shore. As we drew nearer, I saw that the excavations were temporary homes. People were living in holes dug into the bank – some with roofs made of branches turfed over, and with chimneys of stone or clay. I saw whole families there with their goods around them. Above the bank, all along the waterfront, were buildings, mostly in brick, some still unfinished. Porters were carrying goods up the rough steps to the quay, where carts were waiting. All was new, raw, busy, and there were great quantities of mud. On the quay a party of Philadelphia Friends waited to welcome us.

  A sailor tied up our boat at the jetty and people began to disembark.

  I stepped forward, refused the helping hand of the crewman, and sprang ashore.

  Tokpa

  We lie chained together in pairs, naked, on the boards. The ship rolls and pitches, the boards scrape my flesh, and the shackles rub my wrists and ankles raw. It’s dark, and a tumult of sound is in my ears: rattle of chains, creak of timbers, voices that scream and groan and cry out in despair. How many days we lie here I don’t know. It feels like endless time, endless sound, endless pain. In our part of the deck there is one latrine tub for everyone. Many men are sick and can’t climb across others to reach it. They relieve themselves where they are. We lie in our filth. Men quarrel and fight.

  Once a day the demons drive us up on deck and make us dance to a drumbeat. They feed us rice. Some won’t eat, and are forced with beatings. I am afraid, but I want to li
ve. I eat.

  I learn the demons’ language. The captives from the coast already know it. Most of them were traders and fishermen, and they understand many tongues: Kru, Fula, Arabic, English, French, Dutch, Portuguese. They also understand how to sail the ship.

  This great water is called the sea. Some say it has no farther shore; they say we can never go home, that the demons will eat us. But there are men here who watch and learn. They stay strong in spirit and become our leaders. They say we will kill the demons and take this ship and sail it home. Others say that only through death can we go home. There is netting to stop us leaping into the sea, but some get under it. One day when the netting is lifted I see two women link hands, run, leap together. In an instant the sea churns and froths and turns red with blood. Sharks. They follow the ship.

  We captives sing: songs of home, songs of sorrow. Songs travel throughout the belly of the ship; one starts, others join in, voices rise all around. We begin to learn one another’s languages. We pass messages through the songs. The women, who are kept on deck, steal tools and pass them to the men. Our leaders have a plan. My heart fills with hope. I will find my family and we will return to our village and rebuild it.

  But the demons catch the plotters and flog them with knotted whips. They cut off the heads of our leaders and throw the headless bodies into the sea. Now that their bodies are mutilated, the spirits of those men are lost; they can never go home. The ship sails on, and I lie grieving and fearful in its dark, stinking gut.

  At last we see land. The sailors begin to clean the ship. They empty the slop tubs, scrub the boards where we have lain so long, scrub and sand the decks, sweeten the air with herbs. The stench of the ship’s belly is masked. We captives are washed, oiled, our wounds tended or hidden. Some men are sick and have the runs; the crewmen plug their anuses with wads of linen. We are given loincloths to cover our nakedness.

  I am afraid when they take us ashore. A great crowd of beak-nosed demons is waiting. We are put in groups, forced up onto a block. I stand there, chained, shaking with fear.