Brave Music of a Distant Drum by Manu Herbstein

Author:Manu Herbstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fitzhenry & Whiteside
Published: 2012-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Zacharias

I tell my mother that our stock of paper is running low. She says to stop writing and just listen. She tells me about the rest of their journey in Captain Williams’s prison ship, The Love of Liberty.

“For weeks and weeks,” she says, “we lay becalmed in the middle of the ocean.”

Food and water ran low, and every day more slaves were thrown overboard, dead, “to feed the sharks,” she says.

She says that once she had made a partial recovery from the whipping, she vowed that she would never again speak to a white man, but that Senhor Gavin (“your Senhor Gavin,” she calls him) broke her resolve by reading aloud to her.

“What did he read?” I ask her.

“I forget,” she says. “Some English novel. Tom Jones, perhaps. Have you read Tom Jones? Senhora Miranda told me once that Tom Jones was her favorite.”

I tell her that the only book I read these days is the Holy Bible. She says she knows it well, in English and in Portuguese. She says that when she has finished telling me her story, I should read the Book of Ruth to her. I may not be able to do that. I have only brought the New Testament with me.

Then she tells me how a great storm in the Atlantic broke the main mast of their ship and drove it into Salvador.

“São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, the city of the Holy Savior of All Saints Bay,” she says. “Your city.”

Ama’s story

With the crippled ship at anchor in the bay, they brought us soap and buckets of hot water. Soap, mind you, and fresh water, not sea water. They gave us more food and the quality improved. They let us shave our heads. For the first time since leaving Elmina, I was free of lice. They gave us palm oil to rub into our skin and returned our own old cloths to us and let us wash and iron them. I began to feel human again, but I was haunted—we all were—by a sense of foreboding.

After ten days, they ferried us ashore, all of us, women and men. I was with the boy Kofi and his mother. I remember our being led in procession down a long, narrow street, the Rua São Pedro (do you know it?), at the end of which there was a large stone building. When we reached it, Captain Williams and Dr. Butcher stepped out of the cadeira in which they had been riding. An official in a fancy uniform was waiting for them. We followed them up a flight of steps into a spacious hall. As the last of us marched in, the great wooden doors closed behind us with a resounding bang. I clapped my hands to my ears. Since the canon of Elmina and The Love of Liberty, I have always hated loud noises.

Feeling confused and giddy, I closed my eye and stood quite still. Someone pushed me and spoke harshly. It was a black man.

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