Middle Passage

I

                  Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:

                       Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,
                       sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;
                       horror the corposant and compass rose.

                  Middle Passage:
                            voyage through death
                                      to life upon these shores.

                       "10 April 1800—
                       Blacks rebellious.  Crew uneasy.  Our linguist says
                       their moaning is a prayer for death,
                       our and their own.  Some try to starve themselves.
                       Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter
                       to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under."

                  Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann:

                       Standing to America, bringing home
                       black gold, black ivory, black seed.

                            Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,           of his bones
                  New England pews are made,           those are altar lights that were his eyes.

                  Jesus   Saviour   Pilot   Me
                  Over   Life's   Tempestuous   Sea
 

                  We pray that Thou wilt grant, O Lord,
                  safe passage to our vessels bringing
                  heathen souls unto Thy chastening.

                  Jesus   Saviour

                       "8 bells.  I cannot sleep, for I am sick
                       with fear, but writing eases fear a little
                       since still my eyes can see these words take shape
                       upon the page & so I write, as one
                       would turn to exorcism.  4 days scudding,
                       but now the sea is calm again.  Misfortune
                       follows in our wake like sharks (our grinning
                       tutelary gods).  Which one of us
                       has killed an albatross?  A plague among
                       our blacks—Ophthalmia:  blindness—& we
                       have jettisoned the blind to no avail.
                       It spreads, the terrifying sickness spreads.
                       Its claws have scratched sight from the Capt.'s eyes
                       & there is blindness in the fo'c'sle
                       & we must sail 3 weeks before we come
                       to port."

                            What port awaits us, Davy Jones'           or home?  I've
                  heard of slavers drifting, drifting,           playthings of wind and storm and
                  chance, their crews           gone blind, the jungle hatred           crawling
                  up on deck.

                  Thou   Who   Walked   On   Galilee

                       "Deponent further sayeth The Bella J
                       left the Guinea Coast
                       with cargo of five hundred blacks and odd
                       for the barracoons of Florida:

                       "That there was hardly room 'tween-decks for half
                       the sweltering cattle stowed spoon-fashion there;
                       that some went mad of thirst and tore their flesh
                       and sucked the blood:

                       "That Crew and Captain lusted with the comeliest
                       of the savage girls kept naked in the cabins;
                       that there was one they called The Guinea Rose
                       and they cast lots and fought to lie with her:

                       "That when the Bo's'n piped all hands, the flames
                       spreading from starboard already were beyond
                       control, the negroes howling and their chains
                       entangled with the flames:

                       "That the burning blacks could not be reached,
                       that the Crew abandoned ship,
                       leaving their shrieking negresses behind,
                       that the Captain perished drunken with the wenches:

                       "Further Deponent sayeth not."

                  Pilot   Oh   Pilot   Me
 

                            II

                  Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories,
                  Gambia, Rio Pongo, Calabar;
                  have watched the artful mongos baiting traps
                  of war wherein the victor and the vanquished

                  Were caught as prizes for our barracoons.
                  Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity
                  and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah,
                  Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us.

                  And there was one—King Anthracite we named him—
                  fetish face beneath French parasols
                  of brass and orange velvet, impudent mouth
                  whose cups were carven skulls of enemies:

                  He'd honor us with drum and feast and conjo
                  and palm-oil-glistening wenches deft in love,
                  and for tin crowns that shone with paste,
                  red calico and German-silver trinkets

                  Would have the drums talk war and send
                  his warriors to burn the sleeping villages
                  and kill the sick and old and lead the young
                  in coffles to our factories.

                  Twenty years a trader, twenty years,
                  for there was wealth aplenty to be harvested
                  from those black fields, and I'd be trading still
                  but for the fevers melting down my bones.
 

                            III

                  Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,
                  the dark ships move, the dark ships move,
                  their bright ironical names
                  like jests of kindness on a murderer's mouth;
                  plough through thrashing glister toward
                  fata morgana's lucent melting shore,
                  weave toward New World littorals that are
                  mirage and myth and actual shore.

                  Voyage through death,
                                       voyage whose chartings are unlove.

                  A charnel stench, effluvium of living death
                  spreads outward from the hold,
                  where the living and the dead, the horribly dying,
                  lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement.

                       Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,      the corpse of mercy
                  rots with him,      rats eat love's rotten gelid eyes.       But, oh, the
                  living look at you      with human eyes whose suffering accuses you,      whose
                  hatred reaches through the swill of dark      to strike you like a leper's
                  claw.       You cannot stare that hatred down      or chain the fear that stalks
                  the watches      and breathes on you its fetid scorching breath;      cannot
                  kill the deep immortal human wish,      the timeless will.

                            "But for the storm that flung up barriers
                            of wind and wave, The Amistad, señores,
                            would have reached the port of Príncipe in two,
                            three days at most; but for the storm we should
                            have been prepared for what befell.
                            Swift as a puma's leap it came.  There was
                            that interval of moonless calm filled only
                            with the water's and the rigging's usual sounds,
                            then sudden movement, blows and snarling cries
                            and they had fallen on us with machete
                            and marlinspike.  It was as though the very
                            air, the night itself were striking us.
                            Exhausted by the rigors of the storm,
                            we were no match for them.  Our men went down
                            before the murderous Africans.  Our loyal
                            Celestino ran from below with gun
                            and lantern and I saw, before the cane-
                            knife's wounding flash, Cinquez,
                            that surly brute who calls himself a prince,
                            directing, urging on the ghastly work.
                            He hacked the poor mulatto down, and then
                            he turned on me.  The decks were slippery
                            when daylight finally came.  It sickens me
                            to think of what I saw, of how these apes
                            threw overboard the butchered bodies of
                            our men, true Christians all, like so much jetsam.
                            Enough, enough.  The rest is quickly told:
                            Cinquez was forced to spare the two of us
                            you see to steer the ship to Africa,
                            and we like phantoms doomed to rove the sea
                            voyaged east by day and west by night,
                            deceiving them, hoping for rescue,
                            prisoners on our own vessel, till
                            at length we drifted to the shores of this
                            your land, America, where we were freed
                            from our unspeakable misery.  Now we
                            demand, good sirs, the extradition of
                            Cinquez and his accomplices to La
                            Havana.  And it distresses us to know
                            there are so many here who seem inclined
                            to justify the mutiny of these blacks.
                            We find it paradoxical indeed
                            that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty
                            are rooted in the labor of your slaves
                            should suffer the august John Quincey Adams
                            to speak with so much passion of the right
                            of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters
                            and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero's
                            garland for Cinquez.  I tell you that
                            we are determined to return to Cuba
                            with our slaves and there see justice done.
                                  Cinquez—
                            or let us say 'the Prince'—Cinquez shall die."

                       The deep immortal human wish,
                       the timeless will:

                            Cinquez its deathless primaveral image,
                            life that transfigures many lives.

                       Voyage through death
                                           to life upon these shores.